The recent enthusiasm for things postmodern has often produced a caricature of Modernism as monolithic and reactionary. Peter Nicholls argues instead that the distinctive feature of Modernism is its diversity. Through a lively analysis of each of Modernism's main literary movements, he explores the connections between the new stylistic developments and the shifting politics of gender and authority.

Nicholls introduces a wealth of literary experimentation, beginning with Baudelaire and Mallarmé and moving forward to the first avant-gardes. Close readings of key texts monitor the explosive histories of Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, histories that allow Anglo-American Modernism to be seen in a strikingly different light. In revealing Modernism's broad and varied terrain, Nicholls evokes the richness of a cultural moment that continues to shape our own.

Peter Nicholls is Subject Chair of American Studies at the University of Sussex and the author of Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984).

“A notably innovative study in the literary history of modernism. . . . The scope and integrity of Nicholls’s study on the one hand, and the high conceptual level on the other, makes this book stand out among recent modernist studies.”—Modernism

“The first obvious strength of this new literary guide to modernism, reflected in Nicholls’s choice of title, is its insistence on viewing modernisms as a plurality of intersecting aesthetic theories and practices rather than the monolithic movement some critics have attempted to construct. . . . [This book] remains one of the most usefully general guides to modernism I’ve come across (and perhaps the only one to begin to address gender adequately). It would make an excellent source book at the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels—both in the classroom and for thesis-writing students often desperately in need of just such a general overview in which to contextualize their own readings of particular texts.”—English Literature in Transition

"Nicholls' reading is dauntingly eclectic and his prose is highly readable, treating a variety of plays, poems, and novels that many will not be familiar with, and thus living up to his subtitle's tantalizing promise to guide us through the outgrowths that became the postmodern jungle. . . . Nicholls has produced a handbook that will be indispensable for future excavators of Joycean stylistic roots."—James Joyce Literary Supplement

"Excellent. . . . Nicholls manages to provide essential information to approach this body of literary work. He writes with concision and style providing the mainlines of the movement."—Reader's Review

"This is a very timely work that responds to a genuine need in courses and programs on modernism. Nicholls sees that modernism was not an organic phenomenon whose characteristics can be catalogued according to some ideal taxonomy, but a series of anguished questions about identity, desire, memory, culture, and the nature of modernity itself. Few efforts have been made to survey this vast field—this is undoubtedly the finest survey of its kind."—Lawrence Rainey, author of Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture and co-editor of the journal Modernism/Modernity