Contemporaries and Snobs

This new edition of Contemporaries and Snobs, a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.

Laura Riding, later Laura (Riding) Jackson, was a prolific and respected poet, and writer of both fiction and nonfiction, who published all her major poetry during the 1920s and 1930s. During those two decades Riding published thirteen collections of poetry along with six novels and story collections and eight works of nonfiction, including Contemporaries and Snobs. Riding later turned her attention solely to nonfiction, actively publishing until her death in 1991. She was honored with the Mark Rothko Appreciation Award in 1971, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1973, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1979, and Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry in 1991.

Jane Malcolm is an assistant professor of English at the Universite de Montreal. She has written previously about Laura Riding’s gendered poetics and about the ambivalent feminisms of H.D., Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein.

Laura Heffernan is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Florida. She has written previously about the modernist criticism of Rebecca West, John Rodker, T. E. Hulme, and Edmund Wilson.