Modernist Transitions


Book Description

This volume is a critical reader, focusing on the continuities and discontinuities, confirmations and confrontations, crossovers and collisions, appropriations, adaptations and assimilations in the cultural transitions between British and Bangla vernacular modernist fiction within the context of the imperial modernity of the first half of the 20th century. The volume, consisting of critical essays aspires to illuminate, from multiple but intersecting perspectives, those thematic and structural areas where these two kinds of literary modernism, each aesthetically diverse, historically segmented by onslaughts of wars and other outbreaks of suffering and violence, and ideologically convoluted, but conditioned in many ways by common socio-historical catastrophes and promises, interact with each other to constitute an 'aesthetics of motion and dissonance'. Essays cut across literary criticism to employ interdisciplinary approaches, as they blur the boundaries between histories, biographies and fictional narratives, between individual ethics in and outside the fictional world, between imagined and living communities, between real and generic politics, between the home and the world, and between the corporeal and the cultural. These essays interrogate the mastery in literary techniques, narrative motives and dualities, 'major' and 'minor' genres, (de)formations of canons in respect of the 'worldliness' formed by the textual incorporation of the intricate imperial relationships between the United Kingdom and Bangla.




The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats


Book Description

This book focuses on W. B. Yeats’s critical writings, an aspect of his oeuvre which has been given limited treatment so far. It traces his critical work from his earliest articles, through to his occult treatises, and all the way to his last pamphlets, in which he sought to delineate the idea of a literary culture: a community of people willing to credit poetry with the central role in imagining and organising social praxis throughout society. The chapters of this study investigate the contexts in which Yeats’s thought developed, his many disputes over the shape of Irish cultural politics, the future of poetry and the place literature occupies in the world. What transpires is an image of Yeats who is strung between the impulses of faith in the existence of a supernatural order and ironic scepticism as to the possibility of ever capturing that order in language. This study is distinguished by its grounding of Yeats's critical agenda in a broader context through textual analysis. In addition, it organises and systematises his conceptions of poetry and its social role through its approach to his criticism as a fully-fledged area of his artistic practice. The monograph has been written within the framework of the project financed by The National Science Centre, Cracow, Poland, pursuant to the decision number DEC-2013/09/D/HS2/02782.




Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880 - 1930


Book Description

This book examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines.




Weaving Modernism


Book Description

An unprecedented study that reveals tapestry's role as a modernist medium and a model for the movement's discourse on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades following World War II




Modernism and the Marketplace


Book Description

Though the relationship of modernist writers and artists to mass-marketplaces and popular cultural forms is often understood as one of ambivalence if not antagonism, Modernism and the Marketplace redirects this established line of inquiry, considering the practical and conceptual interfaces between literary practice and dominant economic institutions and ideas.




The Contemporaneity of Modernism


Book Description

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform each other? What is modernism’s logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.




Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism


Book Description

Beryl Foster's authoritative study can claim to be the most thorough investigation of this repertoire yet to have appeared in English, and is likely to remain the standard work on the subject for many years to come. TLS --




Modernism Reconsidered


Book Description




Re-Covering Modernism


Book Description

In the first half of the twentieth century, modernist works appeared not only in obscure little magazines and books published by tiny exclusive presses but also in literary reprint magazines of the 1920s, tawdry pulp magazines of the 1930s, and lurid paperbacks of the 1940s. In his nuanced exploration of the publishing and marketing of modernist works, David M. Earle questions how and why modernist literature came to be viewed as the exclusive purview of a cultural elite given its availability in such popular forums. As he examines sensational and popular manifestations of modernism, as well as their reception by critics and readers, Earle provides a methodology for reconciling formerly separate or contradictory materialist, cultural, visual, and modernist approaches to avant-garde literature. Central to Earle's innovative approach is his consideration of the physical aspects of the books and magazines - covers, dust wrappers, illustrations, cost - which become texts in their own right. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, Earle's study shows that modernism emerged in a publishing ecosystem that was both richer and more complex than has been previously documented.




Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-garde to Prehistory


Book Description

Moving through a vast geographical, cultural, and artistic terrain and juxtaposing numerous modernist works, this volume explores the multiplicity of modernism and provides in-depth case studies, including of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the reception of jazz music in Europe, and the Cubist movement in the visual arts.




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