Coda

Summary

The Coda draws out the book’s main arguments and points out further research avenues opened by its reassessment of aesthetic autonomy both for the study of Stevens and for current debates in new modernist studies. It highlights the relevance of the problem of autonomy to considerations of modernisms’ cultural and spatial expansions worldwide, a development that has come to occupy a center stage in contemporary critical debates in modernist studies. The social and political dimensions of autonomy suggest further lines of inquiry that prove relevant to the new critical and methodological approaches modernist studies have developed in recent decades. The concluding section argues that reexamining the various meanings of modernist autonomy from a culturally and geographically expanded angle might reveal multiple transnational histories of autonomy with a potential to enhance our understanding of global modernisms, including specific reference to Stevens’ poetics.