Great War Modernisms and 'The New Age' Magazine

The literary magazine The New Age brought

together a diverse set of intellectuals. Against the backdrop of the First

World War, they chose to write about more than modernist art and aesthetics. By

closely reading and contextualizing their contributions, Paul Jackson's study

engages with the political and philosophical responses of literary artists to

modernity. Jackson demonstrates the need to interpret modernism not merely as an

aesthetic phenomenon,but inherently linked to politics and philosophy.  



By placing the writing of a canonical modernist, Wyndham Lewis, against a

figure usually excluded from the modernist canon, H.G. Wells, Jackson examines

further a wartime modernism that embraced socialist and political views. This

reinterpretation of modernism provides a historicised understanding of the

politicised hopes of artists promoting revolutionary forms of cultural renewal.

Considering modernist writers' relationship between politics,philosophy and

aesthetics in the context of total war Jackson encourages new

cultural-historical definitions of modernism. In addition this study provides

the first close analysis of cultural contributions from a leading wartime

Little Magazine, tracing the radical modernist debates that developed in its

pages.