Modernism empire world literature After World War I American Irish and then Caribbean writers boldly remade the literary world system long dominated by Paris and London. Responding to literary renaissances and social upheavals in their own countries and to the decline of war devastated Europe émigré and domestic based modernists produced dazzling new works that challenged Londons or Pariss authority to determine literary value and propounded their own notions of critical merit these later codified as Modernism. However after World War II an assertive American literary establishment repurposed the literature that had once challenged English and French literary authority to boost the cultural prestige of the United States in the cold war and to contest Soviet conceptions of world literature. Here in strong readings of major works and essays by Henry James Ezra Pound W. B. Yeats T. S. Eliot James Joyce F. Scott Fitzgerald Eugene ONeill and Derek Walcott Joe Cleary situates Anglophone modernism in terms of the rise and fall of European and American empires and disputed histories of world literature.