Book excerpt: Long at the centre of the modernist project, from editing Eliot's The Waste Land to publishing Joyce, Pound has also been a provocateur and instigator of new movements, while initiating a new poetics. This is the first volume to summarize and analyze the multiple contexts of Pound's work, underlining the magnitude of his contribution and drawing on new archival, textual and theoretical studies. Pound's political and economic ideas also receive attention. With its concentration on the contexts of history, sociology, aesthetics and politics, the volume will provide a portrait of Pound's unusually international reach: an American-born, modern poet absorbing the cultures of England, France, Italy and China. These essays situate Pound in the social and material realities of his time and will be invaluable for students and scholars of Pound and modernism.