This book proposes an alternative modernist tradition a line of writers captured by the
archaeological project and the poetic possibilities it created. This tradition spans from
Théophile Gautier's mid-nineteenth-century passion for Egyptology to Charles Olson's literal
excavations on the Yucatan peninsula in the 1950s. With attention to the historical development
of archaeology the author argues that the archaeological became a rich site of cultural
fantasy a location where modernity's alternatives could be considered imagined and
transcribed. These models taking their cue from new archaeological dynamics include the
ushering of primal intensities into the present the tapping of the subterranean unconscious
and the decipherment of an original poetic language. Ranging from psychic excavations to the
reactivation of political templates the plumbing of the archaeological landscape became a key
posture in modernist development which the author pursues through the work of both
twentieth-century modernists and their nineteenth-century substrata. Ambitious in scope this
book provides a compelling argument about the role of archaeology in the modernist literary
imagination and the century-long evolution of the poetics of excavation.
