"Lewis's political writings present ambiguities: his stated belief in the autonomy of art from life is contradicted by other statements he made and by his critical analyses of writers; and his political writings blur any a priori generic distinction between art and non-art. Given this blurring between art and life, artistic genre and non-artistic genre, Quema claims that Lewis's political texts present characteristics usually attributed to avant-gardism. However, this radicalism has to be balanced against Lewis's conservatism. Thus his political writings can be read as allegories with two pragmatic aims: to organize the life of the polis from an artistic standpoint and to persuade the reader to adhere to authoritarian politics."--BOOK JACKET.

In this wide-ranging and original account of Modernism, Michael Levenson draws on more than twenty years of research and a career-long fascination with the movement, its participants, and the period during which it thrived. Seeking a more subtle understanding of the relations between the period's texts and contexts, he provides not only an excellent survey but also a significant reassessment of Modernism itself. Spanning many decades, illuminating individual achievements and locating them within the intersecting histories of experiment (Symbolism to Surrealism, Naturalism to Expressionism, Futurism to Dadaism), the book places the transformations of culture alongside the agitations of modernity (war, revolution, feminism, psychoanalysis). In this perspective, Modernism must be understood more broadly than simply in terms of its provocative works, experimental forms, and singular careers. Rather, as Levenson demonstrates, Modernism should be viewed as the emergence of an adversary culture of the New that depended on audiences as well as artists, enemies as well as supporters. -- Book Description.

This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.

Satirizing Modernism examines 20th-century novels that satirize avant-garde artists and authors while also using experimental techniques associated with literary modernism. These novels-such as Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things-were under-recognized and received poor reviews at the time of publication, but have increasingly been acknowledged as both groundbreaking and deeply influential. Satirizing Modernism analyzes these novels in order to present an alternative account of literary modernism, which should be viewed neither as a radical break with the past nor an outmoded set of aesthetics overtaken by a later postmodernism. In self-reflexively critiquing their own aesthetics, these works express an unconventional modernism that both revises literary history and continues to be felt today.

Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment.

This volume sheds new light on a wealth of early 20th-century engagement with literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity that significantly shaped the work of anglophone literary modernism. The essays spotlight 'translation,' a concept the modernists themselves used to reckon with the Classics and to denote a range of different kinds of reception – from more literal to more liberal translation work, as well as forms of what contemporary reception studies would term 'adaptation', 'refiguration' and 'intervention.' As the volume's essays reveal, modernist 'translations' of Classical texts crucially informed the innovations of many modernists and often themselves constituted modernist literary projects. Thus the volume responds to gaps in both Classical reception and Modernist studies: essays treat a comparatively understudied area in Classical reception by reviving work in a subfield of Modernist studies relatively inactive in recent decades but enjoying renewed attention through the recent work of contributors to this volume. The volume's essays address work significantly informed by Classical materials, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Ovid, and Propertius, and approach a range of modernist writers: Pound and H.D., among the modernists best known for work engaging the Classics, as well as Cummings, Eliot, Joyce, Laura Riding, and Yeats.

This book comprehensively rethinks the relationship between G.K. Chesterton and a range of key literary modernists. When Chesterton and modernism have previously been considered in relation to one another, the dynamic has typically been conceived as one of mutual hostility, grounded in Chesterton’s advocacy of popular culture and modernist literature’s appeal to an aesthetic elite. In setting out to challenge this binary narrative, Shallcross establishes for the first time the depth and ambivalence of Chesterton’s engagement with modernism, as well as the reciprocal fascination of leading modernist writers with Chesterton’s fiction and thought. Shallcross argues that this dynamic was defined by various forms of parody and performance, and that these histrionic expressions of cultural play not only suffused the era, but found particular embodiment in Chesterton’s public persona. This reading not only enables a far-reaching reassessment of Chesterton’s corpus, but also produces a framework through which to re-evaluate the creative and critical projects of a host of modernist writers—most sustainedly, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound—through the prism of Chesterton's disruptive presence. The result is an innovative study of the literary performance of popular and ‘high’ culture in early twentieth-century Britain, which adds a valuable new perspective to continuing critical debates on the parameters of modernism.

Including chapters on the major literary genres, intellectual, political and institutional contexts, film and the visual arts, this text provides both close analyses of individual works of modernism and a broader set of interpretive narratives.

Installationskunsten har gået sin sejrsgang verden over, og er her i det 21. århundrede en både vel- og anerkendt bestanddel af samtidskunsten. Med påvirkning fra og udveksling mellem billedkunst på den ene side og performanceteater på den anden befinder installationskunst sig – som bogens titel viser – netop i feltet mellem billede og scene. I Installation Art: Between Image and Stage undersøger Anne Ring Petersen grundstenene for en af nutidens mest udbredte kunstformer. Installationer er – ligesom skulpturer – tredimensionelle formationer eller billeddannelser, men i modsætning til skulpturen er installationen karakteriseret ved at være formet af rum eller rumlige scenografier, som skaber betydning og sanseoplevelser gennem sit billedsprog. Som resultat af dette er installationer ofte stort anlagte kunstværker, som beskueren kan gå ind i, og de lever dermed til fulde op til nutidens krav om spektakulære, æstetisk iscenesatte events og kulturoplevelser, der taler til sanserne. Gennem grundige analyser af værker af kunstnere som Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Jeppe Hein, Mona Hatoum, Pipilotti Rist og Ilya Kabakov som bagtæppe søges der i denne bog svar på, hvad en installation egentlig er, hvilke virkemidler den bruger, hvordan installationskunstens opståen kan forklares i et kulturhistorisk perspektiv og meget mere. Også installationskunstens rumlige, tidsmæssige og diskursive aspekter såvel som dens receptionsæstetik, der sættes ind i en overordnet kunst- og kulturhistorisk ramme, undersøges. Installation Art: Between Image and Stage er et nyttigt værk for alle, der ønsker at forstå denne mangefacetterede kunstforms konceptuelle fundament. Anne Ring Petersen, dr.phil., er lektor ved Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns Universitet. Har i 2009 udgivetInstallationskunsten mellem billede og scene og er redaktør af Contemporary Painting in Context (2010). Despite its large and growing popularity — to say nothing of its near- ubiquity in the world’s art scenes and international exhibitions of contemporary art — installation art remains a form whose artistic vocabulary and conceptual basis have rarely been subjected to thorough critical examination. In Installation Art: Between Image and Stage, Anne Ring Petersen aims to change that. She begins by exploring how installation art developed into an interdisciplinary genre in the 1960s, and how its intertwining of the visual and the performative has acted as a catalyst for the generation of new artistic phenomena. She investigates how it became one of today's most widely used art forms, increasingly expanding into consumer, popular and urban cultures, where installation's often spectacular appearance ensures that it meets contemporary demands for sense-provoking and immersive cultural experiences. The main trajectory of the book is directed by a movement aimed at addressing a series of basic questions that get at the heart of what installation art is and how it is defined: How does installation structure time, space and representation? How does it address and engage its viewers? And how does it draw in the surrounding world to become part of the work? Featuring the work of such well-known artists as Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist, Ilya Kabakov and many others, this book breaks crucial new ground in understanding the conceptual underpinnings of this multifacious art form. Anne Ring Petersen is associate professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen and the editor of Contemporary Painting in Context.