Bringing together works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, central Europe, the Muslim world, Asia, South America and Australia – many translated into English for the first time – this is the first collection of statements on modernism by writers, artists and practitioners from across the world. Annotated throughout, the texts are supported by critical essays from leading modernist scholars exploring major issues in the contemporary study of global modernism. Global Modernists on Modernism is an essential resource for students and scholars of modernism and world literature and one that opens up a dazzling new array of perspectives on the field.
Winner of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Edited Volume Prize Bringing together works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, central Europe, the Muslim world, Asia, South America and Australia – many translated into English for the first time – this is the first collection of statements on modernism by writers, artists and practitioners from across the world. Annotated throughout, the texts are supported by critical essays from leading modernist scholars exploring major issues in the contemporary study of global modernism. Global Modernists on Modernism is an essential resource for students and scholars of modernism and world literature and one that opens up a dazzling new array of perspectives on the field.
The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada. A detailed introduction provides an overview of the scholarly terrain, and highlights different themes and concerns that emerge in the volume. The Modernist World is essential reading for those new to the subject as well as more advanced scholars in the area – offering clear introductions alongside new and refreshing insights.
Gastro-Modernism ultimately shows how global literary modernisms engage with the food culture to express anxieties about modernity as much as to celebrate the excesses modern lifestyles produce.
"The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in these debates, a “crisis of representation” stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world became a central concern of literary modernists as they operated under Japanese colonial rule. Christopher P. Hanscom examines the critical and literary production of three prose authors central to 1930s literary circles—Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun—whose works confront this crisis by critiquing the concept of transparent or “empiricist” language that formed the basis for both a nationalist literary movement and the legitimizing discourse of assimilatory colonization. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse and questions anew the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The Real Modern challenges Eurocentric and nativist perspectives on the derivative particularity of non-Western literatures, opens global modernist studies to the similarities and differences of the colonial Korean case, and argues for decolonization of the ways in which non-Western literatures are read in both local and global contexts."
When we think of writers today, we often think of them as thin and poor-as starving artists. This book traces the history of this idea, and asks why hunger has been such a compelling metaphor for thinking about writing in modern times.
Winner of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Edited Volume Prize Bringing together works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, central Europe, the Muslim world, Asia, South America and Australia – many translated into English for the first time – this is the first collection of statements on modernism by writers, artists and practitioners from across the world. Annotated throughout, the texts are supported by critical essays from leading modernist scholars exploring major issues in the contemporary study of global modernism. Global Modernists on Modernism is an essential resource for students and scholars of modernism and world literature and one that opens up a dazzling new array of perspectives on the field.
Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to think of modernism globally. Providing alternative approaches, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism introduces pathways through global archives and new frameworks that offer a richer, more representative set of concepts for the analysis of literary and cultural works. In separate essays each inspired by a critical term, this collection explores what happens to the foundational concepts of modernism and the methods we bring to modernist studies when we approach the field as a global phenomenon. Their work transforms the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism, such as tradition, antiquity, style, and translation. New paradigms, such as context, slum, copy, pantomime, and puppets emerge as the archive extends beyond its European center. In bringing together and reexamining the familiar as well as the emergent, the contributors to this volume offer an invaluable and original approach to studying the intersection of world literature and modernist studies.
Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years. In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits. In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.
Remarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms "modernism" and "modernist" become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly modan prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This volume addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938. Its prefatory materials provide a systematic overview of the literary movement’s salient features—anti-naturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of the double self, and actionism—and describe how modanizumu evolved from its early "jagged edges" into a sophisticated yet popular expression of Japanese urban life in the first half of the twentieth century. The modanist style, characterized by youthful exuberance, a tongue-in-cheek tone, and narrative techniques like superimposition, is amply illustrated. Modanizumu introduces faces altogether new or relatively unknown: Abe Tomoji, Kajii Motojiro, Murayama Kaita, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo, Takeda Rintaro, Tani Joji, Yoshiyuki Eisuke, and Yumeno Kyusaku. It also revisits such luminaries as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and the detective novelist Edogawa Ranpo. Key works that it culls from the modernist repertoire include Funahashi Seiichi’s Diving, Hagiwara Sakutaro’s "Town of Cats," Ito Sei’s Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, and Kawabata’s film scenario Page of Madness. This volume moves beyond conventional views to place this important movement in Japanese fiction within a global context: an indigenous expression born of the fission of local creativity and the fusion of cross-cultural interaction.
