Introduces the reader to a wealth of literary experiment, beginning in the 19th century.

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history's traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world. Contributors. Bill Anthes, Peter Brunt, Karen Duffek, Erin Haney, Elizabeth Harney, Heather Igloliorte, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, W. Jackson Rushing III, Damian Skinner, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano

Frustrated by the art world’s elitism and the snobbish exclusivity of the academy’s juries, eight American painters united in 1908 to upend the establish norms and stage their own exhibition of modernist art. Led by the charismatic Robert Henri, they came to be known as "The Eight," and their two-week show at New York’s Macbeth Galleries drew a multitude of visitors, who crowded into the galleries to critique the much-publicized work of these "revolutionary" artists. Their paintings of urban scenes marked a significant departure from the prevailing style—which emphasized physical and natural beauty—and met with critical success. The established chronicle maintains that the Eight were rendered dysfunctional and artistically irrelevant after European modernism arrived in the United States at the 1913 Armory Show. The Eight and American Modernisms revises this account and reevaluates these respected artists’ careers, including their late works. Accompanying a traveling exhibition, this lushly illustrated volume challenges the accepted wisdom about the evolution of the modernist style. In addition to Henri, "The Eight" included William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John French Sloan, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast.

Modernism is hot again. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, poets and architects, designers and critics, teachers and artists are rediscovering the virtues of the previous century’s most vibrant cultural constellation. Yet this widespread embrace raises questions about modernism’s relation to its own success. Modernism’s “badness”—its emphasis on outrageous behavior, its elevation of negativity, its refusal to be condoned—seems essential to its power. But once modernism is accepted as “good” or valuable (as a great deal of modernist art now is), its status as a subversive aesthetic intervention seems undermined. The contributors to Bad Modernisms tease out the contradictions in modernism’s commitment to badness. Bad Modernisms thus builds on and extends the “new modernist studies,” recent work marked by the application of diverse methods and attention to texts and artists not usually labeled as modernist. In this collection, these developments are exemplified by essays ranging from a reading of dandyism in 1920s Harlem as a performance of a “bad” black modernist imaginary to a consideration of Filipino American modernism in the context of anticolonialism. The contributors reconsider familiar figures—such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Josef von Sternberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. H. Auden, and Wyndham Lewis—and bring to light the work of lesser-known artists, including the writer Carlos Bulosan and the experimental filmmaker Len Lye. Examining cultural artifacts ranging from novels to manifestos, from philosophical treatises to movie musicals, and from anthropological essays to advertising campaigns, these essays signal the capaciousness and energy galvanizing the new modernist studies. Contributors. Lisa Fluet, Laura Frost, Michael LeMahieu, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Jesse Matz, Joshua L. Miller, Monica L. Miller, Sianne Ngai, Martin Puchner, Rebecca L. Walkowitz

Moments of crisis and innovation in modernism's cross-cultural past, from the reception of modernist art in colonial India to the experience of African American artists in the New York art world of the 1950s. This first book in the Annotating Art's Histories series revisits the period in which modernist attitudes took shape, examining the ways in which a shared history of art and ideas was experienced in different nations and cultures. Original essays by leading art historians and curators trace the dynamic interplay of cultures across the story of modern art, looking at moments of crisis and innovation in modernism's cross-cultural past. An account of colonialism and nationalism in Indian art from the 1890s to the 1920s, for example, suggests that cultural identities are constantly modifying one another in the very moment of their encounter and points to primitivism as a counter-discourse to modernism. A collision between modernism and colonialism in the design of a Bauhaus model housing project reveals the volatile conditions of European modernism in the 1930s. Discussions of the abstract painting of Norman Lewis and the collages of Romare Bearden illustrate the conflicted experiences and multiple affiliations of African American artists in the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s. The first English translation of an influential essay in the Brazilian neoconcrete movement of the 1950s takes up concerns similar to those of North American minimalism in the 1960s. These and the other journeys into modernism's past described in Cosmopolitan Modernisms return to our contemporary moment with questions about modern art and modernity that we are only beginning to ask. Copublished with inIVA/Institute of International Visual Arts, London.

Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study. Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aimé Césaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Négritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms expands the scope of modernism beyond its traditional focus on English and Irish literature to explore the contributions of artists from countries and regions like the US, Cuba, Spain, the Balkans, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria.