This volume is part of a four-volume series about art and its interpretation in the 19th and 20th centuries. The books provide an introduction to modern European and American art and criticism that should be valuable both to students and to the general reader.

Offering essays from some of the leading academic writers and younger scholars in the field of American studies from both the United States and Europe, this volume constitutes a rich and varied reconsideration of Modernist American poetry. Its contributions fall into two general categories: new and original discussions of many of the principal figures of the movement (Frost, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Cummings and Stevens) and reflections on the phenomenon of Modernism within a broader cultural context (the influence of Haiku, parallels and connections with Surrealism, responses to the Modernist accomplishment by later American poets). Because of its mixture of European and American perspectives, Modernism Revisited will be of vital interest to students and scholars of American literature and Modernism in general and of twentieth-century comparative literature and art.

The modernist movement radically transformed the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary establishment, and its effects are still felt today. Modernism introduces and analyzes what amounted to nothing less than a literary and cultural revolution. In this fully updated and revised second edition, charting the movement in its global and local contexts, Peter Childs: details the origins of the modernist movement and the influence of thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein explores the radical changes which occurred in the literature, drama, art and film of the period traces 'modernism at work' in Anglophone literatures, especially in writings by a range of key figures including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and many others reflects upon the shift from modernism to postmodernism. At once accessible and critically informed, Modernism guides readers from first steps in the field to an advanced understanding of one of the most important cultural movements of the last centuries.

This guide helps readers to engage with the major critical debates surrounding literary modernism. A judicious selection of key critical works on literary modernism Presents a critical history from the earliest reviews to the most recent theoretical assessments Shows how modernist writers understood and constructed modernism. Shows how succeeding generations have developed those constructions and brought new interpretations to bear on the subject Discusses how modernism relates to modernity and odernization, and to other literary and cultural movements Texts have been selected for their relevance to the questions surrounding modernism, and for their accessibility to readers with a limited knowledge of the modernist canon Includes a glossary and an annotated bibliography.

This book explores a rich cultural hybridity at the heart of transatlantic modernism. Focusing on cubism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance in the Danse Sauvage, Sieglinde Lemke uncovers a crucial history of white and black intercultural exchange, a phenomenon until now greatly obscured by a cloak of whiteness. Considering artists and critics such as Picasso, Alain Locke, Nancy Cunard, and Paul Whiteman, in addition to Baker, Lemke documents a potent cultural dialectic in which black artistic expression fertilized white modernism, just as white art forms helped shape the black modernism of Harlem and Paris. Coining the term primitivist modernism to designate the multicultural heritage of this century's artistic production, Lemke reveals the generative and germinating black cultural Other in the arts. She examines this neglected dimension in full, fascinating detail, blending literary theory, social history, and cultural analysis to document modernism's complex absorption of African culture and art. She details numerous ways in which African and African American forms (visual styles, musical idioms, black dialects) and fantasies (Baker's costume and dance, say) permeated high and mass culture on both sides of the Atlantic. So-called primitive art and high modernism; savage rhythms and European music hall culture; European and African American expressions in jazz; European primitivism and the racial awakenings of African American culture: paired and freshly examined by Lemke, these subjects stand revealed in their true interrelatedness. Insisting on modernism's two-way cultural flow, Lemke demonstrates not only that white modernism owes much of its symbolic capital to the black Other, but that black modernism built itself in part on white Euro-American models. Through superbly nuanced readings of individual texts and images (fifteen striking examples of which are reproduced in this handsome volume), Lemke reforms our understanding of modernism. She shows us, in clear, invigorating fashion, that transatlantic modernism in both its high and popular modes was significantly more diverse than commonly supposed. Students and scholars of modernism, African American studies, and cultural studies, and those with interests in twentieth-century art, dance, music, or literature, will find this book richly rewarding.

Until about 1986, feminists generally considered modernism a reactionary, misogynist, and hegemonic mire not worth investigating. Since then enough studies of modernism have appeared that 17 feminist critics can now review and debate their treatment of the period. They evaluate the progress and goals of the new era of modernist scholarship. As the authors in this volume suggest, instead of condemning writers for not practicing or portraying an acceptable politics of gender, we ought instead to show how their assumptions about the nature of the sexes inform their texts, both in their creation and in their reception. This also allows examination of the complex and changing relationship between human subjectivity and aesthetics. This volume is a highly reflective dialogue, introspective and evaluative, at a moment of crisis within modernist studies and feminist studies. The analysis of critical work on early-twentieth-century literature not only helps reread and redefine a definition of modernism; it also intends to redirect and reintegrate feminist theory.