Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (2004)Paperback - 2004, 1 January 2004

Before Modernism Was places modernist writing within the texture of modern history. Texts by Woolf, James, Freud, Wyndham Lewis, Stein, Malinowski, and others are read through a range of figures that construct and disrupt modern meaning: the ghost that affects the value of your property; the sulky, graceless adolescent; the Pole who may not be Polish; the nervous owner of the dog; the addict and her smoke. Eccentric to its institutions, these figures are central to the constituency of modernism.