Introduction

The Modernist Papers is a tour de force of analysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Discussion of Modernist Poetics

Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust and Thomas Mann.

American Literary Field

He explores the peculiarities of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein.

Global Perspectives on Modernism

Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon, he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression, while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Conclusion

Challenging our previous understandings of the literature of this period, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.