SOURCE: Ferrall, Charles. “The New Age and the Emergence of Reactionary Modernism Before the Great War.” Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (autumn 1992): 653-67.

In the following essay, Ferrall examines the New Age and Orage's role in shaping both the modernist political fervor and the debate over the cultural role of art that existed prior to World War I.

It is well known that the New Age played a vital role in the dissemination of literary modernism and post-Impressionist art in Britain before the First World War. Of the three main polemicists of early modernism—T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis—Hulme wrote almost exclusively for the magazine, Pound wrote a large proportion of his criticism for its pages and Lewis, who described the New Age in 1914 as “one of the only good papers in the country” (“Letter” 319), published some of his early stories in the paper and...