Description
Book SynopsisExamining the ways in which modernism is created within specific historical contexts, as well as how it redefines the concept of history itself, this book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes.
Cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions and featuring work from a variety of eminent scholars, it deals with issues as diverse as artistic medium, modernist print culture, autobiography as history writing, avant-garde experimentations and modernism's futurity.
Contributors examine both literary and artistic modernism, combining theoretical overviews and archival research with case studies of Anglophone as well as European modernism, which speak to the current historicizing trend in modernist and literary studies.
Trade ReviewModernism, as Terry Eagleton points out in his witty foreword to this volume, “involves nothing less than the fashioning of whole new forms of human subjectivity.” But this emphasis on newness and nowness conceals the dependence of modernism on the past. Even Ezra Pound’s famous rallying cry “Make it new” implies a pre-existing “it” to be transformed anew. This volume brings together leading scholars to question the idea that modernism breaks free of the past or escapes what Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus calls “the nightmare of history.” Instead, these scholars show how modernism interrogates the methods and meanings of history, challenging any facile division between now and then. * Maud Ellmann, Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor of English, University of Chicago, USA. *
This is a magnificent collection which conjugates modernism and history in marvellously illuminating essays. Modernism often promised to awake from the nightmare of history but it found it difficult to ignore its own historical origins. These essays which range from a reflection on the small magazines in which modernist writing found its most congenial setting to a consideration of Andre Breton as an office manager emphasise the very specific histories in which the general category of modernism took shape. * Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh, USA *
Table of ContentsList of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface Foreword: Modernism, time and history -
Terry Eagleton Historical modernisms: Introduction -
Jean-Michel Rabaté and Angeliki Spiropoulou Part I Historicizing modernism 1 ‘The Last Witnesses’: Autobiography and history in the 1930s -
Laura Marcus 2 Spatial histories of magazines and modernisms -
Andrew Thacker 3 Rethinking the modernist moment: Crisis, (im)potentiality and E. M. Forster’s failed -
Kairos Vassiliki Kolocotroni 4 ‘Well now that’s done: And I’m glad it’s over’: Modernism, history and the future -
Max Saunders 5 Historical and rhetorical emplotments of modernism: An interview with Hayden White -
Angeliki Spiropoulou Part II Stories and histories of the avant-gardes 6 Medium-New -
Tyrus Miller 7 Time assemblage: History in the European avant-gardes -
Sascha Bru 8 Clement Greenberg’s modernism: Historicizable or ahistorical? -
Rahma Khazam 9 Beer in Bohemian Paris: A symbol of the Third Republic -
Alexandra Bickley Trott 10 From the marvellous to the managerial: Life at the Surrealist Research Bureau -
Rachel Silveri 11 History and active thought: The Belgrade surrealist circle’s transforming praxis -
Sanja Bahun Bibliography 234 Index 253
