John Davidson, First of the Moderns explores Davidson's career in London as a penniless author, struggling to reconcile the freedom to experience demanded by the avant-garde artist in the age of the Decadence with the obligations of family, and the ambition for a many-sided reputation as a poet, novelist, and playwright with his need to survive in the commercial rough and tumble of Fleet Street, the theatre and Paternoster Row. The conditions of authorship, the literary scandals and rows of Fleet Street, and the revelations of the characters involved here provide the literary background to the life of John Davidson. The picture that emerges is not simply of a late Victorian rebel, but of a proto-Modernist who from his recovery from a breakdown in 1896 to his strange disappearence and death in 1909, pioneered a new idiom and subject matter for twentieth-century verse.
- ISBN10 0198182481
- ISBN13 9780198182481
- Publish Date 16 November 1995
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 June 2006
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Oxford University Press
- Imprint Clarendon Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 322
- Language English