Money and modernity
Subtitle: Pound, Williams, and the spirit of Jefferson
By: by Alec Marsh.
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Tuscaloosa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 290
Subjects: Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972 -- Political and social views.; Williams, William Carlos, 1883-1963 -- Political and social views.; Williams, William Carlos, 1883-1963 -- Knowledge -- Economics.; Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972 -- Knowledge -- Economics.; Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826 -- Influence.; Capitalism and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Modernism (Literature) -- United States.; Economics in literature.; Money in literature.
Description: The Modernist poets William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound were latter-day Jeffersonians whose politics and poetry were strongly marked by the Populism of the late 19th century. They were sharply aware of the social contradictions of modernization and were committed to a highly politicized, often polemical poetry that criticized finance capitalism and its institutions - notably banks - in the strongest terms.

Providing a history of the aesthetics of Jeffersonianism and its collision with Modernism in the works of Pound and Williams, Alec Marsh traces "the money question" from the republican period through the 1940s. Marsh can thus read two Modernist epics - Pound's Cantos and Williams's Paterson - as the poets hoped they would be read, as attempts to break the hold of "false" financial values on the American imagination.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-280) and index.
Table of contents: title: Preface; title: Acknowledgments; title: Abbreviations; title: Introduction; title: Jeffersonian economics: debt and the production of value; title: Three aspects of the Jeffersonian political aesthetic; title: The virtues of distribution: a genealogy of Poundian economics; title: Fertility rites/financial rites: Pound, Williams, and the political economy of sex; title: Poesis versus production: the economic defense of poetry in the age of corporate capitalism; title: Dewey, Williams, and the pragmatic poem; title: Overcoming modernity: representing the corporation and the promise of pluralism; title: Notes; title: Bibliography; title: Index.