David Ayers
School of English
University of Kent
Finland
Biography
My principal interests are in the fields of Modernism, American Literature and Critical Theory. I am the author of Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (Macmillan, 1992), English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) Modernism: A Short Introduction (Blackwell, 2004) and Literary Theory: A Reintroduction (Blackwell: 2008). My current work, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, is titled ‘Internationalism and the Idea of Europe’ and concerns the cultural impact in Britain of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the League of Nations, with an emphasis on the 1920s. Elements of this work include ‘The English Trotsky’, an analysis of the English language publications of Leon Trotsky and their reception, and ‘The Criterion and Communism’, an analysis of the treatment of Russian politics and culture in T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion. My literary interests include all of the central figures of high modernism (especially Lewis, Pound, Eliot, Loy, Woolf, Lawrence, Ford and Joyce), modern American literature and culture, and the field of poetry in the modernist tradition up to the present day. My interest in philosophy and theory extends from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, Adorno and Benjamin, and includes French theorists and philosophers, especially Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and Badiou.
Research Interest
English
