Marie Sartain

In modernist literature, traditional notions of history are famously subject to interrogation. Driven in part by a general post–World War I disillusionment, many modernist authors understood history not as a static thing, but as a concept to be re-examined and reworked. These writers often reconfigured the past in their writing as a means of recontextualizing the present in hopes of a more productive future, such as the fragmentation of history in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—in which classical...