This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Des, the same year Mallarme published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.

At the beach, bodies converge with the elements and strange treasures come to light. Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of performance—a stage for loosely scripted, improvisatory forms of embodiment and togetherness. The beach, Hannah Freed-Thall argues, was to the modernist imagination what mountains were to Romanticism: a space not merely of anthropogenic conquest but of vital elemental and creaturely connection. With an eye to the peripheries of capitalist leisure, Freed-Thall recasts familiar seaside practices—including tide-pooling, beachcombing, gambling, and sunbathing—as radical experiments in perception and sociability. Close readings of works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, Rachel Carson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, explore the modernist beach as a queer refuge, a precarious commons, a scene of collective exhaustion and endurance, and a visionary threshold at the end of the world. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Modernism at the Beach offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature and its relation to ecological thought.

"Jed Rasula is a preeminent scholar of avant-garde poetics, noted for his erudition, intellectual range, and critical independence. He's also a gifted writer-his recent books have won praise for their entertaining, clear prose in addition to their scholarship. He is also an alumnus of UAP's distinguished Modern and Contemporary Poetics series, which published his Syncopations fifteen years ago. Rasula returns to the MCP series with Wreading, A collection of essays, interviews and occasional writings that reflects the breadth and diversity of his curiosity. One of the referees likened Wreading to a "victory lap, but one that sets its own further record in the taking." This is a collection of highlights from Rasula's shorter critical pieces, but also a carefully assembled and revised intellectual autobiography. Wreading consists of two parts: an assortment of Rasula's solo criticism, and selected interviews and conversations with other critics and scholars (Evelyn Reilly, Leonard Schwartz, Tony Tost, Mike Chasar, Joel Bettridge, and Ming-Qian Ma). The collection opens with a trio of essays that complicate the idea of a "poet." By interrogating the selection of poets for anthologies in the 20th century, Rasula identifies a host of "forgotten" poets, once prominent but now forgotten. Another essay on the state of the poetry anthology reveals how much influence literary gatekeepers have, and what a reimagination of the anthology form could make possible. In subsequent chapters, Rasula finds surprising overlap between Dada and Ralph Waldo Emerson, charts the deep links between image and poetic inspiration, and reckons with Ron Silliman's The Alphabet, a UAP classic. In the book's second half, Rasula engages in detailed conversations with a roster of fellow critics. Their exchanges confront ecopoetics, the corporate university, the sheer volume of contemporary poetry, and more. This substantial set of dialogues gives readers a glimpse inside a master critic's deeply informed critical practice, and lists his intellectual touchstones. The balance between essay and interview achieves a distillation of Rasula's long-established idea of "wreading." In his original use, the term denotes how any act of criticism inherently adds to the body of writing that it purports to read- how Rasula "couldn't help but participate" in his favorite poems. In this latest form, Wreading captures a critical perception that sparks insight and imagination, no matter what it sees"--

Opening with an account of print portraiture facilitating Franz Liszt's celebrity status and concluding with Riot Grrrl's noisy politics of feminism and performance, this interdisciplinary anthology charts the relationship between music and the visual arts from late Romanticism and the birth of modernism to 'postmodernism', while crossing from Western art to the Middle East. Focused on music as a central experience of art and life, these essays scrutinize 'the musicalisation of art' focusing on the visual and performing arts and detailing significant instances of intra-art relations between c. 1840 and the present day. Essays reflect on the aesthetic relationships of music to painting, performance and installation, sound-and- silence, time-and-space. The insistent influence of Wagner is considered as well as the work and ideas of Manet, Satie and Cage, Thomas Wilfred, La Monte Young and Eliasson. What distinguishes these studies are the convictions that music is never alone and that a full understanding of the “isms” of the last two hundred years is best achieved when music's influential presence in the visual arts is acknowledged and interrogated.

Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900 - 1940 is the first study of informality in modernist literature. Differentiating informality from intimacy in its introduction, the book discusses the informal in relation with sensory experience, aesthetic presentation, ethical deliberation or action, and social attitudes within modernist works. It examines these works for particular nuances of the word "informality" in each of its chapters in the following thematic sequence: informality that offers humour, interpretive freedom, and promiscuity as counters to self-absorption in works by Virginia Woolf; rebuttals to male priorities in liberalism through "feminine informality" in several short stories by Katherine Mansfield; contempt for colloquialism and intimacy, tinged with class-anxieties and crises of attitude, in T. S. Eliot’s poetry; resistance to disgust in James Joyce’s novels; and the fusion of irreverence, protest, and praise in W. H. Auden’s writings before 1940. The book’s conclusion considers the risks of informality through a discussion of what it calls "inverted dignity." The theoretical aspects of the book offer insights into Lockean liberalism, the ethical dimensions of what Hélène Cixous termed "feminine writing," relations of sublimity and domesticity, Sigmund Freud’s arguments on humour and melancholia, and recent affect theory’s—as well as Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s—views on disgust, linking these with modernism. This wide range of engagement makes this study relevant for those interested in literary studies, critical theory, and philosophy.

On the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land’s creation, explosive impact, and enduring influence When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. “But,” as Jed Rasula writes, “The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.” In What the Thunder Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music. From its famous opening, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” to its closing Sanskrit mantra, “Shantih shantih shantih,” The Waste Land combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues to inspire readers. Along the way, we learn about Eliot’s storied circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose innovations have proven as consequential as those of the “men of 1914.” Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century’s most influential poem.