In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners—abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others—debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.

Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years. In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits. In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.

How did living abroad inflect writers’ perspectives on social change in the countries of their birth and in their adopted homelands? How did writers reformulate ideas of social class, race, and gender in these new contexts? How did they develop innovations in form and technique to achieve a style that reflected their social and political commitments? The essays in this book show how the “outward turn” that typifies late modernist writing was precipitated, in part, by writers’ experience of expatriation. Late Modernism & Expatriation encompasses writing from the 1930s to the present day and considers expatriation in both its voluntary and coerced manifestations. Together, the essays in this book shape our understanding of how migration (especially in its late twentieth- and twenty-first century complexities) affects late modernism’s temporalities. The book attends to major theoretical questions about mapping late modernist networks and it foregrounds neglected aspects of writers’ work while placing other writers in a new frame.

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should "turn the reader's and writer's attention outwards from himself to the world." Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder. The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.

In East-West Exchange and Late Modernism, Zhaoming Qian examines the nature and extent of Asian influence on some of the literary masterpieces of Western late modernism. Focusing on the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, Qian relates captivating stories about their interactions with Chinese artists and scholars and shows how these cross-cultural encounters helped ignite a return to their early experimental modes. Qian’s sinuous readings of the three modernists’ last books of verse—Williams’s Pictures from Brueghel (1962), Moore’s Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), and Pound’s Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1969)—expand our understanding of late modernism by bringing into focus its heightened attention to meaning in space, its obsession with imaginative sensibility, and its increased respect for harmony between humanity and nature.

"In this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores influential artist and pedagogue Josef Albers's teaching practices. The pedagogy Albers developed at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale consisted in a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended modernist agendas: it involved a set of ideas and practices that cultivated a material way of thinking among his students, which included notable future artists such as Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. By using exercises including paper folding, cutting, and collage, Albers tried to generate a form of "productive disorientation" in his students, teaching them problem-solving strategies to explore new conceptions of composition and color. Saletnik begins by examining Albers's pedagogy in relation to modern aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought. He then examines his design, drawing, and color instruction, focusing on his relationship with Hesse and Serra, showing how their approach to material and scale were shaped by Albers's teaching. Featuring many novel images--including nineteenth-century children's teaching toys as well as rarely seen works by Albers, Serra, and Hesse--this book challenges art historians to consider how artists are introduced to problems of form and how pedagogy shapes their work"--