Title
Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia:
Literary Modernism and Politics
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Author
SURETTE, Leon
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Description
“Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia examines in detail the political writings of three of modernism's best known and most criticized fascist sympathisers: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndam Lewis. Balancing a thorough knowledge of their works with an understanding of the political climate of the early twentieth century, Leon Surette provides new insights into the motivations and development of each writer's respective political postures. Contextualizing their political thought in a world troubled by two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Bolshevik Revolution, Surette traces their shared concerns and the divergent responses of each of these figures in the historical moment to the risk they perceived of democracies becoming the pawns of commercial and industrial elites, leading to war and mindless consumerism. They all leaned toward autocratic solutions, though Pound and Lewis eventually admitted their error.” (MQUP)
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Academic publishing house
McGill-Queen's University Press
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Year
2011