An evaluation that tracks American culture's shift from modernism into postmodernism

Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde is the first study that investigates the intricate influence of the avant-garde movements on children’s literature in different countries from the beginning of the 20th century until the present. Examining a wide range of children’s books from Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the USA, the individual chapters explore the historical as well as the cultural and political aspects that determine the exceptional character of avant-garde children’s books. Drawing on studies in children’s literature research, art history, and cultural studies, this volume provides comprehensive insights into the close relationships between avant-garde children’s literature, images of childhood, and contemporary ideas of education. Addressing topics such as the impact of exhibitions, the significance of the Bauhaus, and the influence of poster art and graphic design, the book illustrates the broad range of issues associated with avant-garde children’s books. More than 60 full-color illustrations demonstrate the impressive variety of design in avant-garde picturebooks and children’s books.

The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks by Philip Nel. Was there a sudden break in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism? Philip Nel attacks the notion of tremendous and sudden change in artistic understanding and literary practice. Instead, in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks he proposes that a series of small but far-reaching changes drew understanding from modernism to postmodernism. What bonds these two periods together? The constant agent of change, Nel argues, was the avant-garde. Tracking its influence on novelists, popular culture figures, and children's authors, this book re-evaluates how twentieth-century culture has been traditionally divided into modern and postmodern. Suggesting that a modernism and postmodernism division prevents accurate evaluation of a work, Nel realigns our conceptions of twentieth-century literature, art, and music. Focusing on eight figures--Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Dr.Seuss, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Chris Van Allsburg, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen-as representative, this book examines works along a spectrum of political involvement. Unencumbered by excessive jargon but deeply rooted in theories of postmodernity, Nel's work has an accessible style, maintaining a balance between high theory and popular discourse. The first book to analyze postmodern children's literature, it revives the radical Dr. Seuss by reading him alongside avant-garde artists. Nel argues that Chris Van Allsburg speaks the Internet generation's vernacular, using a surrealist idiom to pose questions that linger beyond his picture books' final pages. Nel's book is a nuanced and wide-ranged rereading of how postmodernism displays art's ability to imagine a better world. Philip Nel is an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. For over four decades, Tom Raworth has been one of the essential contemporary writers. Poet, printer, publisher, editor, translator, virtuoso performer, visual artist, satirist, foreign correspondent and perpetual shapeshifter, Raworth is an influential and widely admired figure on both sides of the Atlantic; his many publications include TOTTERING STATE, a selected poems now in its third edition, and the monumental Collected Poems published in 2003 by Carcanet. But such accolades seem ony to chase their elusive subject, who remains one of the liveliest and most provocative presences on the contemporary scene. REMOVED FOR FURTHER STUDY is the first booklength appraisal of this quintessential moving target. It brings together new writing on Raworth by twenty-three poets and critics from both sides of the Atlantic, previously uncollected texts by the poet, and a detailed bibliography of his work. Contributors include David Ball, cris creek, Ian Davidson, Nate Dorward, Ken Edwards, Gunnar Harding, Anselm Hollo, Fanny Howe, J. C. C. Mays, Peter Middleton, Alan Munton, Tom Orange, Marjorie Perloff, Simon Perril, Joan Retallack, Peter Robinson, Claude Royet-Journoud, Robert Sheppard, Ron Silliman, Jonathan Skinner, Keith Tuma, Ben Watson and John Wilkinson. REMOVED FOR FURTHER STUDY provides a fresh and engaging set of response to the work of one of the major poets of our time.

This book offers the first in-depth look at avant-garde theatre in the United States from the early 1950s to the 1990s looking at its origins and its theoretical foundations through an examination of literature, cinema and art.

A survey of major poets and movements of American postmodern poetry includes more than four hundred poems by 103 poets