Modernism, Inflation and the Gold Standard in T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

The great inflation of the 1920s had a dramatic effect on Anglophone literary modernism. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway all recognized that financial signs had come unmoored from any objective reference, and their work explores the literary implications of representation's newly au...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inModernist cultures Vol. 16; no. 3; p. 316
Main Author Hawkes, David
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 01.08.2021
Subjects
Anglophones
Economic crisis
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns) (1888-1965)
Ethnolinguistic groups
Fertility
Gold
Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961)
Inflation
Journalism
Logos
Modernism
Pound, Ezra (1885-1972)
Representation
Semiotics
Usury
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Summary:The great inflation of the 1920s had a dramatic effect on Anglophone literary modernism. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway all recognized that financial signs had come unmoored from any objective reference, and their work explores the literary implications of representation's newly autonomous, performative power. Pound blamed the economic and cultural crisis on ‘usury.’ Following Aristotle, he conceived of usury as the unnatural reproduction of autonomous representation, and thus as the antithesis of natural sexual and semiotic fertility. He particularly deplored the historical role played by Samuel Loyd, the Victorian head of Lloyds Bank, who had cunningly manipulated the gold standard in order to give control of the economy to ‘usurers.’ In his financial journalism for Lloyds Bank Monthly , Eliot used the gold standard as an economic logos in order to facilitate usury. Pound saw that Eliot's theory of the ‘objective correlative’ was incompatible with the referential model of representation assumed by the gold standard.
ISSN:2041-1022
1753-8629
DOI:10.3366/mod.2021.0337