Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia

Frank Kermode famously commented that the "correlation between early modernist literature and authoritarian politics" was "more often noticed than explained." Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia examines in detail the political writings of three of modernism's best known and most criticized fascist sympathisers: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndam Lewis. While these authors' political inclinations are well known and much discussed, previous studies have failed to adequately analyse the surrounding political circumstances that informed the specific utopian aspirations in each writer's works. Balancing a thorough knowledge of their works with an understanding of the political climate of the early twentieth century, Leon Surette provides new insights into the motivations and development of each writer's respective political postures. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia examines their political commentary and their correspondence with each other from 1910s to the 1950s. Contextualizing their political thought in a world troubled by two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Bolshevik Revolution, Surette traces their shared concerns and the divergent responses of each of these figures in the historical moment to the risk they perceived of democracies becoming the pawns of commercial and industrial elites, leading to war and mindless consumerism. They all leaned toward autocratic solutions, though Pound and Lewis eventually admitted their error.