Interwar Modernism And The Liberal World Order

"This book is about modernism's role in the reconstruction of the liberal world after 1919. Once we knew how literary modernists saw that liberal world: as the Enemy. When T. S. Eliot calls interwar Britain "worm-eaten with Liberalism," when Ezra Pound remarks in Guide to Kulchur that "liberalism is a running sore," when even W. H. Auden proclaims the failure of interwar liberal political institutions, they spoke for a modernist consensus: interwar liberal world order, with its commitments to progressive democratic reform, promise of rational relations between nations, and hopes for a cosmopolitan perpetual peace, merely veiled the rot of the old bourgeois order. Scholars thus traditionally understood the modernist relationship to liberal interwar government as either a directly antagonistic anti-liberalism or a displaced cultural agonism." --