The literary magazine The New Age brought together a diverse set of intellectuals. Against the backdrop of the First World War, they chose to write about more than modernist art and aesthetics. By closely reading and contextualizing their contributions, Paul Jackson's study explores a variety of political and philosophical responses to modernity. Jackson demonstrates the need to interpret modernisms not merely as an aesthetic phenomena,but as inherently linked to politics and philosophy. By placing the writing of a canonical modernist, Wyndham Lewis, against a figure usually excluded from the canon, H.G. Wells, Jackson's study further examines wartime modernisms that embraced socialist and political views. This study provides the first close analysis of cultural contributions from The New Age, tracing the radical, modernist debates that developed in its pages.

Paul Jackson is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton, UK.