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Modernist Figures brings together three decades of Peter Nicholls’s scholarship on poetry and poetics, tracing how modernism redefined literary form, skepticism, and cultural authority. The collection ranges across American, British, and European traditions, Volume I (New Poetries) beginning with Melville’s transatlantic encounters with skepticism and cynicism, and then repositioning Swinburne as the creator of a distinctively “modern” poetics. Essays on Leopardi, Mallarmé, Ungaretti and Valéry develop the theme of “foreignness” in the new poetry, while later pieces chart how lyric both sustained and was unsettled by modernist innovations in Eliot, Pound, Oppen, and Howe. New Poetries explores divergent American modernisms through Stein and Hemingway, the centrality of allusion in modernist writing, and the complex afterlives of Surrealism in England and in America (the poetry of Lorine Niedecker). Later essays juxtapose metaphysical and materialist strains of modernism, considering poetic “presence” in Oppen, Celan, and Bonnefoy, and analyzing Mina Loy’s feminist “lexicophilia” alongside Pound’s evolving aesthetics.
Price: $104.00
Pages: 430
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Imprint: Ibidem Press
Publication Date:
01 October 2026
Trim Size: 8.27 X 5.83 in
ISBN: 9783838221090
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
LITERARY COLLECTIONS / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / General
Peter Nicholls is probably best known as one of the best readers of Ezra Pound’s Cantos—especially the difficult late Cantos. But as this retrospective collection shows, Nicholls’ interests are much broader than Modernism. Pound is a center of gravity around which orbit many other poets and writers: Swinburne, Mina Loy, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, post-modern poets like Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe. On the prose side, Nicholls reads Stein and Hemingway, and, unexpectedly, Toni Morrison. Nicholls is a meticulous and exciting scholar and himself an important modernist and post-modernist figure as one of our best readers. To have these rich and influential essays under one cover and in one place is a treat for scholarship and remarkable testimony to a lifetime of bravura reading and insightful, brilliant writing.
— Alec Marsh, Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania
Without constructing a system or a genealogy, Modernist Figures expands our current view of modernism by redefining its ambitions and aligning them on contemporary reading practices. Here, one catches a fierce intelligence combining libraries in several languages, moving between comparative literature, literary theory, and cultural history, to produce new connections and original close readings. This expansive survey shows us a modernism that is still alive as it bridges the gap between predecessors like Giacomo Leopardi, Herman Melville, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Emily Dickison, and those who haunt our horizons like Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Susan Howe and Kenneth Goldsmith.
— Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Peter Nicholls is an amazing critic who has exceeded his very high standards in this two-volume collection. His prose is elegantly spare and his critical claims have a scope and depth that I think even exceeds the scope and depth of Hugh Kenner, the only Modernist critic I know good enough to compare to Nicholls. Nicholls can close read with the best of us. But the best of us cannot match the scope and depth of his situating those readings. The first chapter makes a surprising case for Melville as in effect the first modernist for turning to the essay rather than the tract in fiction so that he could have room for a continual skeptical turning over ideas to explore them rather than identify with or against them. Then the second essay on Swinburne, of all topics, may be the best essay I have read from a critic. The essay makes a completely convincing description of two versions of the modern--one historically bound to express its society by turning to distrust of any positive language anchored in ideals, and the second alternative which we know as the Modernism inspired by Pound and Eliot that returns to semantic precision in the service of a greater psychologicual complexity interpreting such skepticism and often justifying it.
— Charles Altieri, University of California at Berkeley
What is compelling about these essays when read through is the deftness and eloquence with which Nicholls explores such a comprehensive range of poetries, ideas and literatures. These volumes of Nicholls’ writings amount to the most thoroughgoing and impressive enquiry into the cultural origins and expanses of the modern and the modernist that I have encountered. Spanning America, Britain, and the languages, literatures and philosophies of Europe, these essays all create arresting insights that challenge us to see writers both familiar and unfamiliar anew.
— Professor Steven Matthews, University of Reading
— Alec Marsh, Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania
Without constructing a system or a genealogy, Modernist Figures expands our current view of modernism by redefining its ambitions and aligning them on contemporary reading practices. Here, one catches a fierce intelligence combining libraries in several languages, moving between comparative literature, literary theory, and cultural history, to produce new connections and original close readings. This expansive survey shows us a modernism that is still alive as it bridges the gap between predecessors like Giacomo Leopardi, Herman Melville, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Emily Dickison, and those who haunt our horizons like Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Susan Howe and Kenneth Goldsmith.
— Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Peter Nicholls is an amazing critic who has exceeded his very high standards in this two-volume collection. His prose is elegantly spare and his critical claims have a scope and depth that I think even exceeds the scope and depth of Hugh Kenner, the only Modernist critic I know good enough to compare to Nicholls. Nicholls can close read with the best of us. But the best of us cannot match the scope and depth of his situating those readings. The first chapter makes a surprising case for Melville as in effect the first modernist for turning to the essay rather than the tract in fiction so that he could have room for a continual skeptical turning over ideas to explore them rather than identify with or against them. Then the second essay on Swinburne, of all topics, may be the best essay I have read from a critic. The essay makes a completely convincing description of two versions of the modern--one historically bound to express its society by turning to distrust of any positive language anchored in ideals, and the second alternative which we know as the Modernism inspired by Pound and Eliot that returns to semantic precision in the service of a greater psychologicual complexity interpreting such skepticism and often justifying it.
— Charles Altieri, University of California at Berkeley
What is compelling about these essays when read through is the deftness and eloquence with which Nicholls explores such a comprehensive range of poetries, ideas and literatures. These volumes of Nicholls’ writings amount to the most thoroughgoing and impressive enquiry into the cultural origins and expanses of the modern and the modernist that I have encountered. Spanning America, Britain, and the languages, literatures and philosophies of Europe, these essays all create arresting insights that challenge us to see writers both familiar and unfamiliar anew.
— Professor Steven Matthews, University of Reading
Peter Nicholls (Author)
Peter Nicholls is Emeritus Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. His publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984), Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2nd ed. 2009), George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2007), and many articles and essays on literature and theory. He has co-edited a number of volumes, including The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2004), Ruskin and Modernism (2001), and How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now (2016). He is currently writing a book about Leopardi.
Chad Hegelmeyer (Foreword by)
Dr. Chad Hegelmeyer, Professor of Humanities at the Oregon Institute of Technology.