“I Hear an Army”

by Anthony Domestico James Joyce, while primarily known for his fiction, was also a published poet whose verse garnered attention (and occasionally praise) from W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and other arbiters of poetic taste in the early twentieth century.  Joyce’s poetry is at times plangent, even self-indulgent, the precious tinkling of sound without the naturalism… Continue Reading “I Hear an Army”

Pomes Penyeach

by Anthony Domestico The 1932 Obelisk Press edition of Pomes Penyeach came at a crucial juncture in James Joyce’s writing career and in the life and mental health of his daughter, Lucia.  At the time, Joyce was internationally renowned for Ulysses and laboring over his Work in Progress; meanwhile, Lucia was descending into the nightmare… Continue Reading Pomes Penyeach

James Joyce

Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis James Joyce (1882-1941) is a colossus of modernist fiction.  He has been derided as obscene and immature and lauded as an erudite humanist; some have deemed his prose impenetrable, too concerned with artifice and verbal gamesmanship, while others have described his writing as life-affirming and always attuned to… Continue Reading James Joyce

Henry James

Biography by Anthony Domestico Henry James was a fierce defender of the novelistic tradition and of formal complexity.  A master of focalization, he showed in works like What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Golden Bowl (1904) the centrality of perspective to a novel’s construction.  His works explored the encounter between Americans and Europeans, between the… Continue Reading Henry James

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

by Anthony Domestico The 1891 publication of Thomas Hardy’s penultimate novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, was met with a great deal of controversy. Having previously appeared in a censored, serialized form in The Graphic, early readers and critics were not ready for the full novel’s portrayal of female sexuality, religious skepticism, and… Continue Reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy

Biography by Anthony Domestico Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was one of the most accomplished poets and novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hardy’s career spanned generations, his first novels appearing at the same time as Middlemarch and his late poems arising during the high modernist period. While primarily celebrated as a novelist during his… Continue Reading Thomas Hardy

Robert Frost

Biography by Anthony Domestico Robert Frost (1874-1963), a New England poet whose verse went far beyond the regional, is one of America’s most popular and well-regarded twentieth-century writers.  He was a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and many of his poems such as “Mending Wall” and “The Road Not Taken” have become touchstones of… Continue Reading Robert Frost

E.M. Forster

Biography by Anthony Domestico E.M. Forster (1879-1970) is difficult writer to classify. An Edwardian modernist, he criticized Victorian middle class mores in formally traditional novels; a writer who idealized connection and sincerity above all else, he kept his own homosexuality hidden from view but defended D.H. Lawrence’s sexually daring Lady Chatterley’s Lover from obscenity charges.… Continue Reading E.M. Forster

“On Impressionism”

by Anthony Domestico As Ford Madox Ford wrote in an introduction to The Good Soldier, this 1914 novel was his initial attempt “to extend [himself], to use a phrase of horse-race training.”[1] Ford explains that The Good Soldier was his first bid to put his theoretical concerns about the novel into fictional, fleshly life.  He… Continue Reading “On Impressionism”

Ford Madox Ford

Biography by Anthony Domestico Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), poet, novelist, essayist, and editor, was an important figure in the beginning years of the modernist movement.  Ford’s poetry, although not studied much today, was considered elegant and formally interesting in its day; both Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence thought Ford one of the best poets of… Continue Reading Ford Madox Ford