In this book, Barry McCrea argues that the sudden linguistic homogenization of the European countryside was a key impulse in the development of literary modernism. The decline of rural vernaculars caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections. Seán Ó Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages for use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist idealization of Irish as a lost utopian language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself.

Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the sources and meanings of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how metropolitan literary culture was fundamentally shaped by the vanishing vernaculars of the European countryside.