Reading 1922 A Return to the Scene of the Modern

This engaging study returns to a truly remarkable year, the year in which both Ulysses and The Waste Land were published, in which The Great Gatsby was set, and during which the Fascisti took over in Italy, the Irish Free State was born, the Harlem Renaissance reached its peak, Charlie Chaplin's popularity crested, and King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered. In short, the year which not only in hindsight became the primal scene of literary modernism but which served as the cradle for a host of major political and aesthetic transformations resonating around the globe.
In his previous study, the acclaimed Dialect of Modernism (OUP, 1994), Michael North looked at the racial and linguistic struggles over the English language which gave birth to the many strains of modernism. Here, he expands his vision to encompass the global stage, and tells the story of how books changed the future of the world as we know it in one unforgettable year.

This study returns to the year in which Ulysses and The Waste Land were published to replace those works among the other cultural productions of the year, in the hope of giving a new start to critical controversies about aesthetic modernism and modern culture. It makes the claim that relations between these are a good deal closer and more complex than recent criticism has been willing to allow, and it illustrates these relations in its mode of organization, in order to reconstruct the larger public world into which these works were introduced.