Abstract
This thesis builds on the ongoing transnational turn in modernist studies by highlighting the key nature of specific relationships at the level of personal collaboration, thereby complicating theoretical models based on reified perceptions of the ‘national’ literatures of the imperial ‘center’ and its colonial ‘others’. I demonstrate how transnational perspectives, always localized, always the product of specific engagements, are present at the very outset of literary modernism. My thesis responds to Mao and Walkowitz’s call to examine how modernists “designed new models of transnational community” (739), to enquire precisely how these communities were constituted, and how they worked. In the case of Yeats’ relationship with Purohit Swami and Pound’s with Ernest Fenollosa I maintain that a key model for their transnational communities was collaboration; thus reading their transnational modernism through collaboration provides a new and more dynamic way of understanding Anglo-American modernism’s transnational engagements. While there is clear acknowledgement of the importance of both collaboration (for instance, Yeats/George Yeats, Yeats/Pound, Pound/Imagists, Pound/Eliot) and transnationalism to Yeats and Pound, these two key tendencies in Anglo-American modernism have not been investigated together. My thesis addresses this gap by investigating concrete examples of transnational collaboration in their modernist literary works: both neglected relationships (in the case of Swami-Yeats) and acknowledged ones (in the case of Fenollosa-Pound) where the collaborative aspects have not been fully recognized.