T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism

His work as poet, critic, philosopher, aesthetician, and political theorist helped define several major aesthetic and political movements, including imagism and Vorticism. Despite his influence, however, the man T.S. Eliot described as ‘classical, reactionary, and revolutionary’ has until very recently been neglected by scholars, and T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism is the first essay collection to offer an in-depth exploration of Hulme’s thought. While each essay highlights a different aspect of Hulme’s work on the overlapping discourses of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, taken together they demonstrate a shared belief in Hulme’s decisive importance to the emergence of modernism and to the many categories that still govern our thinking about it.