Paul K. Saint-Amour is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination, winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book, and the editor of Modernism and Copyright. With Jessica Berman, he edits the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia University Press.

Paul K. Saint-Amour, MSA Book Prize Winner, The Modernist Studies Association
Shortlisted, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, 2015 Matei Calinescu Prize

"...Tense Future offers not only novel readings of major modernist texts alongside total-war discourse but also a compelling portrait of the interwar years as the moment when the experience of late modernity, structured by the expectation of terrible violence, is most strikingly articulated and challenged in literature. ...Saint-Amour's illuminating book opens up a stimulating new way to comprehend twentieth-century culture, and Tense Future's performance of critical futurities...will no doubt shape, indeed drive, some significant scholarship still to come." --modernism/modernity

"This short review scarcely does justice to the deftly plaited arguments of Tense Future, its interdisciplinary reach, conceptual daring, and literary brio. Saint-Amour's preface reveals that the book took ten years to be written, and its maturity testifies to the benefits of long gestation. Brilliantly original in conception and execution, Tense Future will terrorize the competition well into the future of modernist studies." --Modern Philology

"By moving our vision from earth to sky, from soldiers in the trenches to civilians under air raids, Paul Saint-Amour makes rich and surprising our understanding of the twentieth-century and its literature. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and we ourselves emerge in the arresting light of this first modern collective anxiety." --Elaine Scarry, author of Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom

"This book is a tour de force, introducing an entirely new approach to the modernist imagination. Saint-Amour makes us hear the undertones of menace in interwar literature, thereby reconfiguring modernist fiction as meditations on disasters to come." --Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History

"Paul Saint-Amour reinterprets culture during the years between World War I and World War II as an era of anxious anticipation. Thoughtful, penetrating, and important, Tense Future expands our understanding of war's destructive power." --Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences

"Tense Future moves fluently through the cultural records of the First World War, interwar, Second World War, and Cold War. Creating a wholly new archive, Saint-Amour does nothing less than shift the tense of imaginative action in the literature of major record: from memory, which Paul Fussell established as its primary imaginative circumstance, to anticipation; from reverie to dread. Our way of reading the literature of a century of war will be changed by this comprehensive and compelling account." --Vincent Sherry, author of Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence

"...we should hope that a second volume of Tense Future is in the works..." -Public Books