T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism

Though only 34 years old at the time of his death in 1917, T.E. Hulme had already taken his place at the center of pre-war London's advanced intellectual circles. His work as poet, critic, philosopher, aesthetician, and political theorist helped define several major aesthetic and political movements, including imagism and Vorticism. Despite his influence, however, the man T.S. Eliot described as 'classical, reactionary, and revolutionary' has until very recently been neglected by scholars, and T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism is the first essay collection to offer an in-depth exploration of Hulme's thought. While each essay highlights a different aspect of Hulme's work on the overlapping discourses of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, taken together they demonstrate a shared belief in Hulme's decisive importance to the emergence of modernism and to the many categories that still govern our thinking about it. In addition to the editors, contributors include Todd Avery, Rebecca Beasley, C.D. Blanton, Helen Carr, Paul Edwards, Lee Garver, Jesse Matz, Alan Munton, and Andrew Thacker. Introduction, Edward P. Comentale, Andrzej Gasiorek; Chapter 1 The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks, Paul Edwards; Chapter 2 A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language, Andrew Thacker; Chapter 3 ‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme, Rebecca Beasley; Chapter 4 Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis, Alan Munton; Chapter 5 T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’, Helen Carr; Chapter 6 Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism, Jesse Matz; Chapter 7 Hulme Among the Progressives, Lee Garver; Chapter 8 Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?: Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion, Andrzej Gasiorek; Chapter 9 ‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism, Todd Avery; Chapter 10 The Politics of Epochality: Antinomies of Original Sin, C. D. Blanton; Chapter 11 Hulme’s Feelings, Edward P. Comentale;