Italian Futurism and the Development of English Literary Modernism

Going against most accounts of Futurism in England, this book unpacks the profound influence of Italian Futurism’s role in the development of English literary modernism. Arguing that Futurism represented for many English modernists a profoundly relevant approach to a social and cultural crisis that had emerged in the late nineteenth century—the separation between art and life—it frames Futurism as a methodology that they appropriated to subvert and develop fin-de-siècle cultural discourses, in a bid to become ‘modern’.

Beginning with an analysis of Italian Futurism’s transnational affiliations, its position in the European cultural field, and a reassessment of its reception in England, it goes on to re-evaluate three key modernist figures: the Poetry Bookshop proprietor and editor Harold Monro; the Vorticist impresario Wyndham Lewis; and the poet and artist Mina Loy. In doing so, it not only offers a new history of the Futurist movement in England and Anglophone contexts, but also begins to reconceptualise early modernist historiography.