In this book, a professor of literature and a physicist offer a broad, new, interdisciplinary account of Modernism. Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook encompass physics, the visual arts and literature in a thought-provoking analysis of the period from the 1880s to World War II. Uncovering common structures and values underlying each of these disparate fields, the authors define Modernism and its historical location between nineteenth-century intellectual conventions that preceded it and the Postmodernism that followed. Bridging boundaries that traditionally divide disciplines, Vargish and Mook create a uniquely coherent and comprehensive view of the aesthetics and intellectual values that characterize the culture of Modernism.

Grouped into 21 thematic sections, this collection provides theoretical introductions to the primary texts provided by the scholars who have taken the lead in pushing both modernism and gender in different directions. It provides an understanding of the complex intersections of gender with an array of social identifications.

Analyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of a multifaceted transnational modernism. While the work of diverse, major Egyptian artists during this era may have appeared to be secular, she argues, it reflected the subtle but essential inflection of Islam, as a faith, history, and lived experience, in the overarching development of Middle Eastern modernity. Challenging typical views of modernism in art history as solely Euro-American, and expanding the conventional periodization of Islamic art history, Seggerman theorizes a "constellational modernism" for the emerging field of global modernism. Rather than seeing modernism in a generalized, hyperconnected network, she finds that art and artists circulated in distinct constellations that encompassed finite local and transnational relations. Such constellations, which could engage visual systems both along and beyond the Nile, from Los Angeles to Delhi, were materialized in visual culture that ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to photography and prints. Based on extensive research in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, this richly illustrated book poses a compelling argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism.

Marshall Berman was a political theorist, urbanist, and public intellectual that gave a generation a way to think about what it means to be modern. He offered a vision of Marx as a preeminent modernist and humanist, which served as a touchstone for his exploration into the complexity of our modern world and lives. Marshall was singularly capable of seamlessly weaving together the ideas of Dostoevsky and Kurtis Blow, the experiences of St. Petersburg and the South Bronx. In so doing, he helped make sense of the maelstrom of modern life into which we are born, and helped buttress a sense of optimism in the midst of a chaos in which all that is solid melts into air.Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman is a testament to just how deeply and broadly his influence can be felt, as its contributors consist of theorists, architects, media critics, urbanists, and historians from across the globe. Some essays demonstrate the potential for applying Marshall?s methods of analysis into new locales such as Iran or Scotland. Others return to familiar places like the South Bronx or Times Square in order to stretchor update Marshall?s analyses. Some essays engage Marshall as a theorist, and analyze his ideas of public, urban life, and of modernism and modernity. Another explores the impact Marshall?s work has in the classroom, as well as his own role as a teacher. Collectively, the essays that comprise this volume reflect deeply on Marshall?s work, and speak to its continued relevance in helping to not only decipher, but to find meaning in our modern world.

In Migrant Modernism, J. Dillon Brown examines the intersection between British literary modernism and the foundational West Indian novels that emerged in London after World War II. By emphasizing the location in which anglophone Caribbean writers such as George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and Samuel Selvon produced and published their work, Brown reveals a dynamic convergence between modernism and postcolonial literature that has often been ignored. Modernist techniques not only provided a way for these writers to mark their difference from the aggressively English, literalist aesthetic that dominated postwar literature in London but also served as a self-critical medium through which to treat themes of nationalism, cultural inheritance, and identity.

Early Modernism is a uniquely integrated introduction to the great avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting at the beginning of this century, from the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada. In contrast to the overly literary focus of previous studies of modernism, this book highlights the interaction between the arts in this period. It traces the fundamental and interlinked re-examination of the languages of the arts brought about by Matisse, Picasso, Schoenberg, Eliot, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Ben, and many others, which led to radically new techniques, such as atonality, cubism, and collage. These changes are set in the context both of the art that preceded them and of a new and profound shift in ideas. Theories of the unconscious, the association of ideas, primitivism, and reliance upon an expressionist intuition led to a reshaped conception of personal identity, and Butler examines the representation of the modernist self in the work of figures including Mann, Joyce, Conrad, and Stravinsky. Accessible and wide-ranging, the book is lavishly illustrated with over sixty illustrations, many in color. It provides an elegant and incisive guide to a momentous period in the history of European art.

In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism. This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia. Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.

A mural renaissance swept the United States in the 1930s, propelled by the New Deal Federal Art Project and the popularity of Mexican muralism. Perhaps nowhere more than in New York City, murals became a crucial site for the development of abstract painting Artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner created ambitious works for the Williamsburg Housing Project, Floyd Bennett Field Airport, and the 1939 World’s Fair. Modernism for the Masses examines the public murals (realized and unrealized) of these and other abstract painters and the aesthetic controversy, political influence, and ideological warfare that surrounded them. Jody Patterson transforms standard narratives of modernism by reasserting the significance of the 1930s and explores the reasons for the omission of the mural’s history from chronicles of American art. Beautifully illustrated with the artists’ murals and little-known archival photographs, this book recovers the radical idea that modernist art was a vital part of everyday life.

This collection of essays from world-renowned scholar Hans Walter Gabler contains writings from a decade and a half of retirement spent exploring textual criticism, genetic criticism, and literary criticism. In these sixteen stimulating contributions, he develops theories of textual criticism and editing that are inflected by our advance into the digital era; structurally analyses arts of composition in literature and music; and traces the cultural implications discernible in book design, and in the canonisation of works of literature and their authors. Distinctive and ambitious, these essays move beyond the concerns of the community of critics and scholars. Gabler responds innovatively to the issues involved and often endeavours to re-think their urgencies by bringing together the orthodox tenets of different schools of textual criticism. He moves between a variety of topics, ranging from fresh genetic approaches to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, to significant contributions to the theorisation of scholarly editing in the digital age. Written in Gabler’s fluent style, these rich and elegant compositions are essential reading for literary and textual critics, scholarly editors, readers of James Joyce, New Modernism specialists, and all those interested in textual scholarship and digital editing under the umbrella of Digital Humanities.

The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers. Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others. A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture.