Book excerpt: "This book is about modernism's role in the reconstruction of the liberal world after 1919. Once we knew how literary modernists saw that liberal world: as the Enemy. When T. S. Eliot calls interwar Britain "worm-eaten with Liberalism," when Ezra Pound remarks in Guide to Kulchur that "liberalism is a running sore," when even W. H. Auden proclaims the failure of interwar liberal political institutions, they spoke for a modernist consensus: interwar liberal world order, with its commitments to progressive democratic reform, promise of rational relations between nations, and hopes for a cosmopolitan perpetual peace, merely veiled the rot of the old bourgeois order. Scholars thus traditionally understood the modernist relationship to liberal interwar government as either a directly antagonistic anti-liberalism or a displaced cultural agonism." --