This literary history examines Guillaume Apollinaire's reception and influence in the Western hemisphere during the early twentieth century. Ir identifies and reconstructs major literary and art historical paths of development, about which surprisingly little is known. In particular, it discusses Apollinaire's reception and formative influence in North America, England, Germany, Spain, Argentina, and Mexico, and includes important documents by Apollinaire himself that have not appeared in print until now. "Bohn brings together a worldwide network of writers, artists, and critics to reveal the role and centrality of Apollinaire as the icon of Parisian modernism, cult figure of the avant-garde, poet with a new series of techniques, esthetician of the New, innovator of modern culture, and literary and cultural arbiter of his generation. "This is Rezeptionsesthetik in its most intense form. It is the definitive reference book for checking on who had any dealings with Apollinaire, the man or his work, and French modernism in English, German, Spanish or Catalan linguistic and cultural domains in both the Old and New Worlds. Bohn's translations from the various languages he commands are superb and prove that he is always working from source material. His text is simply a tour de force, a virtuoso performance". -- Seth L. Wolitz, University of Texas, Austin "Given the centrality of French poetry for European and New World poetry since Baudelaire, one simply cannot overstate Apollinaire's role in the evolution of the most advanced poetry written throughout Europe and North and South America since circa 1900. However, no one before has tracked his impact on avant-garde circles outsideFrance with so much attention to the specifics involved. Bohn has emerged as the dean of Apollinaire studies in North America; thus everything he has to say about the poet has the ring of absolute authority". -- Robert W. Greene, State University of New York, Albany

Far from frivolous playthings, modern visual poems represent serious experiments. Together with other members of the avant-grade, the visual poets sought to restructure the basic vision of reality that they inherited from their predecessors. This statement describes contemporary visual poets as well who, like their earlier colleagues, strive to say things that are more meaningful in ways that are more meaningful."--BOOK JACKET.

Avant-Gardes in Crisis claims that the avant-gardes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are in crisis, in that artmaking both responds to political, economic, and social crises and reveals a crisis of confidence regarding resistance's very possibility. Specifically, this collection casts contemporary avant-gardes as a reaction to a crisis in the reproduction of life that accelerated in the 1970s—a crisis that encompasses living-wage rarity, deadly epidemics, and other aspects of an uneven management of vitality indexed by race, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, class, and disability. The contributors collectively argue that a minoritarian concept of the avant-garde, one attuned to uneven patterns of resource depletion and infrastructural failure (broadly conceived), clarifies the interplay between art and politics as it has played out, for instance, in discussions of art's autonomy or institutionality. Writ large, this book seeks to restore the historical and political context for the debates on the avant-garde that have raged since the 1970s.

Reviewing the previous scholarship for seventeen of the most important poems in Alcools, this book provides a detailed analysis of each work and includes a state-of-the-art survey of current Apollinaire criticism. Besides acquainting readers with the existing scholarship, the book considers all the interpretations that have been proposed and indicates profitable directions to pursue. Each poem is subjected to a rigorous, line-by-line analysis that engages in a succession of dialogues with previous critics. The studies themselves are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning with the “Rhénanes” in 1901-1902 and concluding with “Zone” in 1912. Although each chapter is basically conceived as an independent unit, readers are able to follow the evolution of Apollinaire’s aesthetics from his first mature creations through his subsequent experiments with fantastic, hermetic, visionary, and cubist poetry. At the same time, they witness Apollinaire’s personal evolution from his infatuation with Annie Playden through a period of deep depression, his love affair with Marie Laurencin, and the aftermath of that relationship.

Conrad Steel shows how the history of poetry has always been bound with our changing logistics of macroscale representation. This history takes us back to the years before the First World War in Paris, where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed to have invented a new mode of poetry large enough to take on the challenges of the coming twentieth century. The Poetics of Scale follows Apollinaire's ideas across the Atlantic and examines how and why his work became such a vital source of inspiration for American poets through the era of intensive American economic expansion and up to the present day.

The first volume of the new series “European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies” focuses on the relation between the avant-garde, modernism and Europe. It combines interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics. The essays, written by experts from more than fifteen countries, seek to bring out the complexity of the European avant-garde and modernism by relating it to Europe’s intricate history, multiculturalism and multilingualism. They aim to inquire into the divergent cultural views on Europe taking shape in avant-garde and modernist practices and to chart a composite image of the “other Europe(s)” that have emerged from the (contemporary) avant-garde and experimental modernism. How did the avant-garde and modernism in (and outside) Europe give shape to local, national and pan-European forms of identity and community? To what extent does the transnational exchange and cross-fertilisation of aesthetic tendencies illustrate the well-rehearsed claim that the avant-gardes form a typically European phenomenon? Dealing with canonised as well as lesser known exponents of modernism and the avant-garde throughout Europe, this book will appeal to all those interested in European cultural, literary and art history.

In 1909 the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Founding Manifesto of Futurism was published on the front page of Le Figaro. Between 1909 and 1912 the Futurists published over thirty manifestos, celebrating speed and danger, glorifying war and technology, and advocating political and artistic revolution. This collection of essays aims to reassess the activities of the Italian Futurist movement from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its activities and legacies in the field of poetry, painting, sculpture, theatre, cinema, advertising and politics. The essays offer exciting new readings in gender politics, aesthetics, historiography, intermediality and interdisciplinarity. They explore the works of major players of the movement as well as its lesser-known figures, and the often critical impact of Futurism on contemporary or later avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Dada and Vorticism. The publication will be of interest to scholars and students of European art, literature and cultural history, as well as to the informed general public.

This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.

Birth of a National Icon examines the emergence of the intellectual in fin-de-siècle France, setting this important phenomenon against the backdrop of an emerging mass democracy and concentrating on the key role played by the avant-garde.