First published in 1977, this book focuses on Modernism, one of the most frequently used terms in the discussion of twentieth-century literature and culture. It provides an historical account of the concept, showing the relation of Modernism to Victorian culture and uses the work of Henry James and W. B. Yeats in its analysis. The text focuses on the time period between 1910 and 1930 and considers the criticism of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the complex relationship of D. H. Lawrence to Modernism. The author also includes a section on developments since 1930 to show both the value of Modernism as a critical term, and the problems of achieving an exact usage.
First published in 1987, this book provides a wide-ranging account of how modern cities have come to look as they do — differing radically from their predecessors in their scale, style, details and meanings. It uses many illustrations and examples to explore the origins and development of specific landscape features. More generally it traces the interconnected changes which have occurred in architecture and aesthetic fashions, in planning, in economic and social conditions, and which together have created the landscape that now prevails in most of the cities of the world. This book will be of interest to students of architecture, urban studies and geography.
First published in 1982, this book provides a descriptive and comparative study of some of the fundamental structural aspects of modernist poetic writing in English, French and German in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work concerns itself primarily with basic structural elements and techniques and the assumptions that underlie and determine the modernist mode of poetic writing. Particular attention is paid to the theories developed by authors and to the essential ‘principles of construction’ that shape the structure of their poetry. Considering the work of a number of modernist poets, Theo Hermans argues that the various widely divergent forms and manifestations of modernistic poetry writing can only be properly understood as part of one general trend.
Why do the cities of the late twentieth century look as they do? What values do their appearance express and enfold? Their sheer scale and the durability of their materials assure that our cities will inform future generations about our era, in the same way that gothic cathedrals and medieval squares tell us something of the Middle Ages. In the meantime, our urban landscapes can tell us much about ourselves. For E. C. Relph, the urban landscape must be envisioned as a total environment—not just streets and buildings but billboards and parking meters as well. The Modern Urban Landscape traces the developments since 1880 in architecture, technology, planning, and society that have formed the visual context of daily life. Each of these shaping influences is often viewed in isolation, but Relph surveys the ways in which they have operated independently to create what we see when we walk down a street, shop in a mall, or stare through a windshield on an expressway. Two sets of ideas and fashions, Relph argues, have had an especially important impact on urban landscapes in the twentieth century. An "internationalism" made possible by new building technologies and more rapid communications has replaced regional style and custom as the dominant feature of city appearance, while a firm belief in the merits of self-consciousness has imposed logical analysis and technical manipulation on such commonplace objects as curbstones and park benches. "As a result," writes Relph, "the modern urban landscape is both rationalized and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human."
This title was first published in 2002. This really is a text that will fill a long-felt want. A key figure in that history is Amédée Ozenfant, painter, critic and friend of Le Corbusier, who in the first half of this century founded a school in London where he conducted experiments and wrote about color in architecture. Those experiments have been reconstructed for the book, which also includes reprints of his most important articles on the subject. This book provides a fascinating survey of this most contemporary topic that will inspire and inform designers and architects. Color has often been regarded as the final dressing of a building, subject to the vagaries of fashion and left to the client to select. There have been a number of studies of polychromy in the architecture of the more distant past, particularly in relation to modern conservation practices, but there is little or nothing on the architectural color of recent times, and especially within Modernism.
British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. Faulk focuses on the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already achieved commercial prominence began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. The book discusses recordings such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album, the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and television films such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus that defined rock's early high art moment. Faulk argues that these 'texts' disclose the primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly comprised of young working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by sampling music hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture above the new medium. Rock groups engaged with the music of the past in order both to demonstrate the comparative vitality of the new form and signify rock's new art status, compared to earlier British pop music. The book historicizes punk rock as a later development of earlier British rock, rather than a rupture. Unlike earlier groups, the Sex Pistols did not appropriate music hall form in an ironic way, but the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren were obsessed with the meaning of the past for the present in a distinctly modernist fashion.
Anthony Smith's important work on the concept of social change, first published in 1973, puts forward the paradigm of historical change as an alternative to the functionalist theory of evolutionary change. He shows that, in attempting to provide a theory of social change, functionalism reveals itself as a species of 'frozen' evolutionism. Functionalism, he argues, is unable to cope with the mechanisms of historical transitions or account for novelty and emergence; it confuses classification of variations with explanation of processes; and its endogenous view of change prevents it from coming to grips with the real events and transformations of the historical record. In his assessment of functionalism, Dr Smith traces its explanatory failures in its accounts of the developments of civilisation, modernisation and revolution. He concludes that the study of 'evolution' is largely irrelevant to the investigation of social change. He proposes instead an exogenous paradigm of social change, which places the study of contingent historical events at its centre.
First published in 1989, this re-issue concerns itself with the relevance of Max Weber's sociology for the understanding of modern times. The book outlines key tenets of Weber's sociology and points to the valuable legacy of Weber's thought in contemporary intellectual debate, particularly with regard to secularization and rationalization of global cultures, the crisis of Marxism, the rise of the New Right and the emergence of post-modernism. This book offers an authoritative and insightful study which brings to light, not only the contemporary relevance of Weber's social theory, but also offering a broad perspective for the analysis of social questions.
First published in 1990, this is the first book-length study of Susan Sontag: essayist and analyst of culture, author of ‘Notes on Camp’ and Illness as Metaphor, novelist, reviewer, and filmmaker. It was modernism, and the excitement it created in her, that "rescued" Sontag from childhood in Southern California and sent her abroad in the 1950s. Sohnya Sayres looks into the foundations and directions of Sontag’s imposing work and in doing so discovers a unity of design and subject that Sontag has only recently acknowledged to have been an ambition all along. Sayres’s Sontag is the "elegiac modernist", committed to a modernism whose high noon has long since passed. And yet Sayres finds in Sontag’s lifelong indebtedness to modernism’s aesthetic an inherent conservatism. While guiding us through the work of a brilliant critic, Sayres questions whether Sontag is not herself caught in the paradoxes of the modernism she herself so much admires. A comprehensive analysis of the work of a remarkable intellectual, this title will be of value to any student of American modernism and literary life.
First published in 1990, this collection of essays in literary criticism, feminist theory and race relations was named one of the top twenty-five books of 1988 by the Voice Literary Supplement. The title covers such subjects as black literature; the reconstruction of culture, changing arts, letters and sciences to include the topics of women and gender; and, the nature of family and the changing roles of women within society. As such, Catharine Stimpson employs a transdisciplinary approach, to encourage greater understanding of the differences among women, and thus socially-constructed differences in general. Where the Meanings Are tells of some of the arguments within feminism during the re-designing and designing of cultural spaces, as post-modernism began to change the boundaries of race, class, and gender. It will therefore be of great value to students and general readers with an interest in the relationship between gender and culture, sex and gender difference, feminist theory and literature.
