"Charles Altieri, one of our foremost analysts of modernism, has in his recent work argued for the importance of the affects, which philosophy has too long subordinated to cognition and ethics. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri focuses his attention on modernist poetry, especially that of Wallace Stevens. He argues that critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which modernist poetry, like modernist art, breaks from the...

"Charles Altieri's book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context by analysing how major poets reacted to the challenge posed by modernist painting's radical critique of traditional representational models for art. It argues that modernist poets have tended to resist the received values of their contemporary culture by finding idealising principles in modes of pure abstraction. It traces the use of such abstraction in literature...

Postmodernism today is driven by a set of theoretical stances that grow increasingly problematic. But as the theoretical contradictions emerge, it becomes possible to contrast this theoretical discourse to the ambitions that initially led writers and artists to pursue their version of postmodern perspectives. So this book explores what remains viable and valuable in some representative versions of what these writers and artists created. Altieri begins...