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Examining 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.
List of contents
List 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
About the author
Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of the world's foremost literary theorists. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Rabaté has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound, and Joyce. Recent books include Crimes of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2014), The Cambridge Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Literature (2014), The Pathos of Distance (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Rust (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is one of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slought.org) and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Angeliki Spiropoulou is Professor of Modern European Literature and Theory at Peloponnese University, and Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. She works on English and European modernism. She has authored or (co-)edited the books: Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin; History of European Literature 18th-20thC.; Culture Agonistes; and Walter Benjamin: Images and Myths of Modernity.
Summary
Examining 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.
Foreword
This book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of high modernism and the artistic avant-gardes cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions.
Additional text
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.
