Framing Pieces takes as its starting point the premise that the frames of modern art - the notes, marginalia, critical essays, and longer prose pieces with which James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound surrounded their texts - perform complex aesthetic and socio-political work. John Whittier-Ferguson discusses a variety of texts and contexts, including Finnegan's Wake, A Room of One's Own, The Pargiters, Three Guineas, and Pound's prose and poetry from the 1930s.

He argues that the study of twentieth-century apparatus is crucial to the comprehension of the text it brackets and of the self-conscious, self-promoting, and self-elucidating and obscuring nature of the moderns gathered in this book.

Whittier-Ferguson introduces his inquiry with a discussion of the paradigmatic instance of the modernist apparatus, Eliot's notes to The Waste Land. From there, he leads his readers into an exploration of questions central to the study of modernism today. He considers the political inflections of Modernist texts and traces the uncertain domain of the avant-garde.

Further, Whittier-Ferguson determines the means by which writers make claims to different forms of cultural authority and demonstrates the ways an author's designs are themselves ultimately framed by historical forces that resist all designing. Turning his readers' attention to the margins of canonical modernism, Whittier-Ferguson newly illuminates authors and texts central to an understanding of twentieth-century art and culture.