Examines literary modernism in its relation to the history of criticism by analysing the role of Aristotelian principles primarily the notion of formal affectivism in the critical writings of these three modernists who have invariably been thought to uphold incompatible aesthetic beliefs whereas Eliot saw himself as a classicist modernist Stevens and Woolf shared a marked anticlassicist stance. Despite their initially incompatible attitudes to literary history and criticism this study discloses their convergence on the Aristotelian notion of formal affectivism demonstrated through specific conceptual shifts. The main feature of the book is its originality of approach which seeks a diachronic solution to a synchronic problem the debate about the Modern reflected in the claims and counterclaims made by the modernists themselves and by subsequent literary critics and theorists.