John Mullan
John Mullan - Professor John Mullan (UCL English Language & Literature) explains why 1922 was the year that literature changed, with Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and TS Eliot leading the way. In the spring 1922 issue of the avant-garde American literary journal Little Review, Ezra Pound published a calendar for a modern era. The months were renamed after Greek and Roman deities, under the heading "Year 1 p.s.U". Readers in tune with literary innovations knew that those letters stood for "post scriptum Ulysses", or "after the writing of Ulysses". With the publication of James Joyce's novel in February 1922, on the author's 40th birthday, a new age had begun. Pound (his most famous slogan: "Make It New") was a great one for announcing, or demanding, literary revolutions; this time history would vindicate him. A century on, 1922 still looks like the year literature changed, when modernism came into its own.
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