<p>Culturalcritic Fredric Jameson, renowned for his incisive studies of thepassage of modernism to postmodernism, returns to the movement that dramatically broke with all tradition in search of progress for the first time since hisacclaimed <em>A Singular Modernity</em> .</p><p><em>The Modernist Papers</em>is a tour de froce of anlysis and criticism, in which Jameson bringshis dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernistpoetics, including intensive discussions of the work of Baudelaire,Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann. Heexplores the peculiarties of the American literary field, taking inWilliam Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines thelanguage theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism assimply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to itsJapanese expression; while the complexities of a late modernistrepresentation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in aconcluding section on Peter Weiss's novel <em>The Aesthetics of Resistance</em>.</p><p>Challenging our previous understanding of the literature of this pperiod, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism. </p>