Introduction

Abstract

Currently taking place in Britain is a remarkable flourishing of poetic activity, in which the advances of modernism—long treated by the British literary mainstream as a historical aberration, thankfully now defunct—are being embraced anew and pursued in thrilling, and thrillingly unpredictable, directions. It is to celebrate and interrogate this flourishing that we have assembled the essays that make up Modernist Legacies. However, Modernist Legacies does not simply comment upon this flourishing; acting as a forum in which critics and practitioners debate, harangue, proselytize, and provoke, it also seeks to embody it. It follows from this that Modernist Legacies makes no claim to be a definitive or exhaustive account of the landscape of contemporary practice in Britain, either in that the topics it treats are exhaustive of the work currently being done, or in that it treats its topics exhaustively. Rather, it offers a cross-section of current activity, myriad points of entry into a body of work characterized by its sheer diversity.