Modernism: A Short Introduction

‘David Ayers provides the reader with a series of interlacing readings – all of them original and provocative – of some major texts of Anglo-American modernism. Ayers’s central theme is the relation of the linguistic to the social in all its complex “modernist” manifestations. The theories of Benjamin and Adorno, as well as of Derrida, provide an important base for understanding the great poetries and fictions of the period. But Modernism is first and foremost a book of close and acute readings of specific poems and novels – a book at once richly textured and yet also enjoyable to read.’

Marjorie Perloff