Before Modernism Was places modernist writing within the texture of modern history. Texts by Woolf, James, Freud, Wyndham Lewis, Stein, Malinowski, and others are read through a range of figures that construct and disrupt modern meaning: the ghost that affects the value of your property; the sulky, graceless adolescent; the Pole who may not be Polish; the nervous owner of the dog; the addict and her smoke. Eccentric to its institutions, these figures are central to the constituency of modernism.
This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.
This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.
The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity. Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.
Drawing upon medical journals, newspapers, propaganda, military histories, and other writings of the day, 'Modernism, History and the First World War' reads such writers as Woolf, HD, Ford, Faulkner, Kipling, and Lawrence alongside fiction and memoirs of soldiers and nurses who served in the war. This ground breaking blend of cultural history and close readings shows how modernism after 1914 emerges as a strange but important form of war writing, and was profoundly engaged with its own troubled history.
"Art history after modernism" does not only mean that art looks different today; it also means that our discourse on art has taken a different direction, if it is safe to say it has taken a direction at all. So begins Hans Belting's brilliant, iconoclastic reconsideration of art and art history at the end of the millennium, which builds upon his earlier and highly successful volume, The End of the History of Art?. "Known for his striking and original theories about the nature of art," according to the Economist, Belting here examines how art is made, viewed, and interpreted today. Arguing that contemporary art has burst out of the frame that art history had built for it, Belting calls for an entirely new approach to thinking and writing about art. He moves effortlessly between contemporary issues—the rise of global and minority art and its consequences for Western art history, installation and video art, and the troubled institution of the art museum—and questions central to art history's definition of itself, such as the distinction between high and low culture, art criticism versus art history, and the invention of modernism in art history. Forty-eight black and white images illustrate the text, perfectly reflecting the state of contemporary art. With Art History after Modernism, Belting retains his place as one of the most original thinkers working in the visual arts today.
This book explores China’s encounter with architecture and modernity in the tumultuous epoch before Communism – an encounter that was mediated not by a singular notion of modernism emanating from the west, but that was uniquely multifarious, deriving from a variety of sources both from the west and, importantly, from the east. The heterogeneous origins of modernity in China are what make its experience distinctive and its architectural encounters exceptional. These experiences are investigated through a re-evaluation of established knowledge of the subject within the wider landscape of modern art practices in China. The study draws on original archival and photographic material from different artistic genres and, architecturally, concentrates on China’s engagement with the west through the treaty ports and leased territories, the emergence of architecture as a profession in China, and Japan’s omnipresence, not least in Manchuria, which reached its apogee in the puppet state of Manchukuo. The study’s geographically, temporally, and architecturally inclusive approach framed by the concept of multiple modernities questions the application of conventional theories of modernity or post-colonialism to the Chinese situation. By challenging conventional modernist historiography that has marginalised the experiences of the west’s other for much of the last century, this book proposes different ways of grappling with and comprehending the distinction and complexity of China’s experiences and its encounter with architectural modernity.
A History of Modernist Literature offers a critical overview of modernism in England between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, focusing on the writers, texts, and movements that were especially significant in the development of modernism during these years. A stimulating and coherent account of literary modernism in England which emphasizes the artistic achievements of particular figures and offers detailed readings of key works by the most significant modernist authors whose work transformed early twentieth-century English literary culture Provides in-depth discussion of intellectual debates, the material conditions of literary production and dissemination, and the physical locations in which writers lived and worked The first large-scale book to provide a systematic overview of modernism as it developed in England from the late 1890s through to the late 1930s
The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s. Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the body and experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuated characters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforward as it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widely accepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and its humanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-century predecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche. Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Fore investigates five artistic devices that were central to interwar realism. He analyzes Bauhaus polymath László Moholy-Nagy's use of linear perspective; three industrial novels riven by the conflict between the temporality of capital and that of labor; Brecht's socialist realist plays, which explore new dramaturgical principles for depicting a collective subject; a memoir by Carl Einstein that oscillates between recollection and self-erasure; and the idiom of physiognomy in the photomontages of John Heartfield. Fore's readings reveal that each of these "rehumanized" works in fact calls into question the very categories of the human upon which realist figuration is based. Paradoxically, even as the human seemed to make a triumphal return in the culture of the interwar period, the definition of the human and the integrity of the body were becoming more tenuous than ever before. Interwar realism did not hearken back to earlier artistic modes but posited new and unfamiliar syntaxes of aesthetic encounter, revealing the emergence of a human subject quite unlike anything that had come before.
