Offering a new approach to the intersection of literature and philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of idealist thought require artistic form for their full development and that modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist Idealism intervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but also early cinema. The author’s main contention is that, in various media and with sometimes radically different political and cultural aims, a host of modernist artists and thinkers can be seen as sharing in a project to realize idealist philosophical worldviews in aesthetic form.

Modernist Idealism develops a framework for understanding modernist production as the artistic realization of philosophical concepts elaborated in German idealism.

In this volume Robert Pippin disputes many traditional characterisations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is the founder of modern theater, and his plays are performed all over the world. Yet in spite of his unquestioned status as a classic of the stage, Ibsen is often dismissed as a fuddy-duddy old realist, whose plays are of interest only because they remain the gateway to modern theater. In Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism , Toril Moi makes a powerful case not just for Ibsen's modernity, but for his modernism. Situating Ibsen in his cultural context, she shows how unexpected his rise to world fame was, and the extent of his influence on writers such Shaw, Wilde, and Joyce who were seeking to escape the shackles of Victorianism. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism also rewrites nineteenth-century literary history; positioning Ibsen between visual art and philosophy, the book offers a critique of traditional theories of the opposition between realism and modernism. Modernism, Moi argues, arose from the ruins of idealism, the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the nineteenth century. She also shows why Ibsen still matters to us today, by focusing on two major themes-his explorations of women, men, and marriage and his clear-eyed chronicling of the tension between skepticism and the everyday. This radical new account places Ibsen in his rightful place alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet as a founder of European modernism.

This study offers a reconsideration of Wyndham Lewis's work up to the 1930s, based on a wide-ranging engagement with theories of modernity and modernism, against a background of Enlightenment thought. The author, David Peters Corbett, Reader in History of Art, University of York. There was a time not so long past when it was possible to read the whole of the book-length critical literature on Wyndham Lewis in a week or ten days. As late as 1978 there was no bibliography of the writings, no biography, and little scholarship that did more than sketch the beginnings of an understanding of Lewis's literary output, his thinking about art and society, and his historical importance. The situation was even less developed for Lewis's visual art. Walter Michel's Wyndham Lewis of 1971 was and remains an important achievement, but it was a lonely monument. There was a story current that if one ordered certain of the more arcane Lewis items at the British Library, one's slip was returned with 'destroyed by enemy action' marked on it. Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but at the time it seemed to posses a strong symbolic rightness. discursive writing in politics, aesthetics, sociology and philosophy, and in what we would now call cultural studies, and his apparent determination to reject not only his literary and artistic peers but the entire culture, ensured that he appeared in books, articles and degree courses, if at all, as a quirky and marginal figure. From 1979, when Frederic Jameson's Fables of Aggression: The Modernist as Fascist appeared as the first book-length study by a major and influential critic, this situation began rapidly to change. From being a figure on the margins Lewis came to seem increasingly central to new readings of modernism and its complexities as work in both literature and art history perceived Lewis anew as a major figure whose career and work occupied a place at the centre of our understanding of the art and literature of the early twentieth century. the scholarly editions of Lewis's works published by Black Sparrow press in California, Alan Munton's edition of the Complete Poems and Plays (1979), two biographies, and a host of literary critical studies - has been the exceptional work of research and interpretation contained in Paul Edwards's Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (2000). Edwards's profound Lewis scholarship allowed him to provide a synoptic but detailed account of Lewis's entire oeuvre, which it would be hard to imagine bettered. In the wake of this book's appearance - when it was partnered by Paul O'Keeffe's excellent biography (also 2000) - there is now a feeling that Lewis has no further need for detailed explications of his ideas, theories and attitudes. He is now established, the groundwork has been meticulously done, and the seriousness and importance of his work can be assumed. The way is clear for studies of Lewis that investigate his relationship to specific issues, or which concentrate on particular elements in his work. to 'Enlightenment' and the concepts of rationality and the avant-garde is the first book to fulfil the promise of that possibility. Wragg's study takes a set of issues that are central to the understanding of modernity and literary and artistic modernism and situates Lewis's work at their heart. The Lewis who emerges from his productive context is a thinker, writer and visual artist whose oeuvre might 'form part of a critical manual on enlightened behaviour' (Chapter 6), and whose diagnoses of the world of modernity have continued relevance both for our understanding of his time and for our own analyses of our own lives and experience as citizens of enlightenment. Lewis is situated anew in the context of one of the most profound and compelling debates about modernity and modern life, and in that context he thrives. In undertaking this positioning and working through the discussion in precise detail, David Wragg's book marks a new and productive departure for studies of Lewis.

Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, 2e presents a new interpretation of the negative and critical self-understanding characteristic of much European high culture since romanticism and especially since Nietzsche, and answers the question of why the issue of modernity became a philosophical problem in European tradition.