Peter Nicholls

Henry James Professor of English and American Letters

Education

Ph.D. 1982, M.A. 1975, B.A. 1972, Cambridge

Areas of Research/Interest

Twentieth-century British and American literature; international modernism; modern and contemporary poetry and poetics

External Affiliations

Member, British Association of American Studies; European Network of Avant-garde and Modernist Studies; Modernist Studies Association, Australian Modernist Studies Network. Textual Practice, Editor, 2002-2009, North American Associate Editor, 2009-present. Member of editorial boards of Paideuma, Modernist Cultures, Revue Françaises d’Etudes Américaines, College Literature, Affirmations: Of the Modern.

Fellowships/Honors

Finalist, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize; Arthur Miller Essay Prize; Leverhulme Research Fellowship

Bio

Peter Nicholls has published widely on twentieth-century writing, with recent works including Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2nd ed. 2008) and George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2009). He is especially interested in connections between American and European poetry, and in the political and economic dimensions of literary texts. Nicholls taught previously at the University of Sussex, where he was Professor of English and American Literature and editor of the journal Textual Practice.

Books

  • How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now, ed. with Rebecca Colesworthy
    London: Routledge, 2015
  • Thinking Poetry, introd. & ed. with Peter Boxall
    London: Routledge, 2013
  • Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde, and High and Low Culture, ed. with Sascha Bru
    Berlin: Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2012
  • On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, ed. and introd., with Sara Crangle
    London: Continuum, 2010). Paperback edition, 2012
  • Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 2nd expanded ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
  • Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of the Continent, ed. with Sascha Bru (Berlin: Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2009)
  • George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Paperback edition 2013.
  • The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. and introd.,with Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Paperback edition 2012.
  • Ruskin and Modernism, ed. and introd., with Giovanni Cianci (London: Palgrave, 2001)
  • 90s Fictions, ed. with Kate Ogborn and Andrea Stuart, Special Issue of Critical Quarterly, 37.4 (Winter 1995).
  • Politics, Economics and Writing: A Study of Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ (London: Macmillan / Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984).
  • Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing
    Humanities Press, 1984

Recent Essays

  • “Afterword,” in Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism, ed. Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 207-14
  • “Allusion,” in Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Olga Taxidou, ed., A Dictionary of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
  • "Skepticism," Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, 3. 5 (Summer 2016)
  • “Bravado or Bravura? Reading Ezra Pound’s Cantos,” in Modernism and Masculinity: Literary and Cultural Transformations, ed. Natalya Lusty and Julien Murphet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
  • “Modernism and the Limits of Lyric,” in The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, ed. Marion Thain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
  • “Hard and Soft Modernisms: Politics as ‘Theory,’” in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013)
  • “’You in the dinghy astern there’: Learning from Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound and Education, ed. Steven G. Yao and Michael Coyle (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2012)
  • “Modernism,” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)
  • “That ‘saving ray of strangeness’: the late poems of George Oppen,” in Aberration in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Stephen Matterson and Lucy Collins (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co, 2012)
  • “Destinations: Secession and Broom,” in Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History, 3 vols, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), vol. 2
  • “Rhetoric and Poetry: Modernism and Beyond,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
  • “Beginning the End: Ezra Pound and the Poetics of Survival,” in Ezra Pound: Ends and Beginnings, ed. John Gery and William Pratt (New York: AMS, Inc., 2011)
  • “Stein, Hemingway, and American Modernisms,” in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, ed. Leonard Cassuto, Benjamin Reiss and Clare Eby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  • “’Arid Clarity’: Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, and Jules Laforgue,” in The Salt Companion to Mina Loy, ed. Rachel Potter and Suzanne Hobson (Cambridge: Salt, 2010)
  • “The Elusive Allusion: Poetry and Exegesis,” in Teaching Modernism, ed. Nicky Marsh and Peter Middleton (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Recent Articles

  • “’A Mouthful of Air’: Modern Poetry and the Idea of Presence,” Comparative Literature Studies, 57. 1 (Spring 2020)
  • “Mina Loy and Lexicophilia,” Feminist Modernist Studies, 2. 3 (Fall 2019), 1-11.
  • "Hilarious Commentary: Ezra Pound’s Canto XCVIII," Glossator, Special Issue on Ezra Pound’s Thrones, 11 (2018), 51-82
  • "Swinburne and the Modern Poem," Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 26 (Fall 2017), 81-101
  • “Psalms: Reading Oppen with Celan and Rilke,” Journal of Religion and Literature (August 2016)
  • “Just the Thing? Stephen Burt on American Poetry,” American Literary History, 28. 2 (Summer 2016)
  • “Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address,” Affirmations: of the New, Special Issue on Rhetoric and Modernism, 2. 3 (2015)
  • “Numerousness and Its Discontents: George Oppen and Lyn Hejinian,” Aerial, 10 (Fall 2015)
  • ‘Late Pound: The Case of Canto CVII,’ Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 8. 19 (Fall 2015)
  • “Herman Melville: Scepticism, Cynicism, and the Memoirs of a Greek,” Textual Practice, 29.1 (2015)
  • “Ezra Pound’s Lost Book: Orientamenti,” Modernist Cultures, 9. 2 (2014)
  • “Marjorie Perloff’s 21st-Century Modernism,” Jacket 2, Special Issue on the work of Marjorie Perloff (November, 2012)
  • “Skin deep: Lynne Tillman’s American Genius, A Comedy,” Electronic Book Review (2011)
  • “A Necessary Blindness: Ezra Pound and Rhythm,” Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, 6. 13 (Fall 2010)