Anthony Domestico

Anthony Domestico is an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY and the books columnist for Commonweal. His book, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period​​, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can view his Purchase College faculty page here, and his website containing his book reviews and essays here.    

William Butler Yeats

Biography by Anthony Domestico W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is the figure most associated with the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century; his poetry, prose, and drama helped earn him the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature.  He was a complex amalgam of influences and interests, deeply engaged with the political issues of Home Rule yet equally… Continue Reading William Butler Yeats

The Russian Point of View

by Anthony Domestico Written in 1925 for The Common Reader, “The Russian Point of View” is Virginia Woolf’s most compelling piece of critical writing on the ethos of Russian literature. In it, she gathers together the threads of two previous essays, “The Russian View” and “Tchehov’s Questions,” as well as her thoughts on Tolstoy and… Continue Reading The Russian Point of View

The Voyage Out

by Anthony Domestico Virginia Woolf began her first novel sometime during the summer of 1906 or the fall of 1907, and did not finish it until nearly nine years later in the first year of World War I on March 26, 1915.[1] Originally entitled “Melymbrosia,” the work underwent a number of technical and thematic changes… Continue Reading The Voyage Out

H.G. Wells

Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most prolific, popular, and varied writers of the early twentieth century.  His numerous works crossed genres, from science fiction to socialist treatises, from Edwardian satire to sweeping histories, from short stories to Utopian novels.  He loomed large in the popular and… Continue Reading H.G. Wells

May Sinclair

Biography by Anthony Domestico May Sinclair (1863-1946) is one of the forgotten modernists.  Close friends with Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, and others, Sinclair was the first British writer to praise T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations, the first critic to use the term “stream-of-consciousness” to describe a literary technique, and the creator of a… Continue Reading May Sinclair

Dorothy Richardson

Biography by Anthony Domestico Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), now largely ignored but once regarded as one of the most important of modernist novelists, was a pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness technique.  Her thirteen-novel project, Pilgrimage, is a prime example of modernism at its finest and most maddening: dilatory in its pacing, challenging in its form, and concerned… Continue Reading Dorothy Richardson

Ezra Pound

Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis Critic, poet, impresario, and propagandist, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was one of the shaping forces of modernism, with connections to the era’s most influential writers of prose and poetry.  In championing the liberatory effects of free verse and in skillfully practicing the techniques of collage and allusion, Pound placed a… Continue Reading Ezra Pound

The Plough and the Stars

by Anthony Domestico In February 1926, Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, a play that directly critiqued the Easter Rising of 1916, debuted at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.  The play depicted the co-opting of the Labour Movement by the Nationalists, criticizing the jettisoning of Socialist economic principles in favor of blind, impractical patriotism.… Continue Reading The Plough and the Stars

Sean O’Casey

Biography by Anthony Domestico Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) was one of Ireland’s most celebrated modern dramatists.  The internationally acclaimed productions of his plays, including Juno and the Peacock and The Plough and the Stars, helped launch the Abbey Theatre as a preeminent stage for world drama, and his realistic depiction of the struggles of Ireland for independence were… Continue Reading Sean O’Casey