Intellectuals abroad: The modernist travel writings of Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West

In this dissertation, I examine travel and travel writing among British and American writers during the years between World War I and World War II. I focus in particular on how Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West variously employed the travel genre to record and assess the tumultuous interwar years. I see the travel writing of these authors as opportunities for them to record events, current and historical, public and private, as they reconsider the value of eyewitness testimony and the conditions of visibility in the transmission and promulgation of both historical knowledge and political and social reality.; Although he never completed a full-length travel book himself, Ezra Pound is important to this study because of his firm belief in travel both as an inalienable right and as a necessary way to learn about foreign cultures and traditions in a modern world that in his mind had become cut off from its past. I describe in particular how Pound's conception of The Cantos altered after he personally encountered the travel restrictions that emerged during the First World War. The subsequent distinctions he made between poetry and prose in his essays of the thirties and forties, where he attributed to prose a primarily diagnostic function, prompt my argument about the travel books of Cummings, Lewis, and West.; I next examine Eimi, Cummings's account of his 1931 trip to the Soviet Union for the way it reveals Cummings's sense of his identity as a poet and an individual. Cummings's idiosyncratic, often cryptic style highlights the difficulties that Cummings faced as he attempted to articulate what he saw in Russia. I then turn to Filibusters in Barbary for the ways in which Lewis both criticizes and praises aspects of the French colonial government in what he calls a “satiric enterprise.” I read Filibusters in Barbary for how Lewis's satire relates to the empirical methods of the travel book and for how, by means of this satire, he draws parallels between the political landscape of colonial Morocco and that of post-war England. West's Yugoslavia book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon charts the complicated route by which both current events and historical knowledge are transmuted into information both for those in the Balkans and for those back home in England who in the late thirties were facing the prospect of another war. Arguing intensely against the policy of appeasement towards Germany's expansionist tendencies, West saw her travel book as a way of both chronicling the region's complicated history and of making manifest the crisis facing the west.; In their travel books, Cummings, Lewis, and West confronted most directly the tumult of revolution, the effects of empire, and the upheavals of war as they pondered the polysemous nature of cultural artifacts, the contradictory messages of political reality, and the opposing arguments of history. The travel book was for them a means not only of portraying and diagnosing the countries that they visited but a method for reconsidering the nature and impact of empirical and historical evidence during the strife-filled period between the wars.