Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone is a landmark study that will move the field of musicology in important new directions. The book presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Perséphone at the Paris Opera on April 30th, 1934, engaging with the collaborative, transnational nature of the production. Author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how these collaborators-- Igor Stravinsky, André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Ida Rubinstein, among others-used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s. As a result of its focus on the collaborative performance, this book differs from traditional accounts of musical modernism and neoclassicism in several ways. First and foremost, it centers on the performance of modernism, highlighting the theatrical, performative, and sensual. Levitz places Christianity in the center of the discussion, and questions the national distinctions common in modernist research by involving a transnational team of collaborators. She further breaks new ground in shifting the focus from "history" to "memory" by emphasizing the commemorative nature of neoclassic listening rituals over the historicist stylization of its scores, and contends that modernists captured on stage and in philosophical argument their simultaneous need and inability to mourn the past. The book as a whole counters the common criticism that neoclassicism was a "reactionary" musical style by suggesting a more pluralistic, ambivalent, and sometimes even progressive politics, and reconnects musical neoclassicism with a queer classicist tradition extending from Winckelmann through Walter Pater to Gide. Modernist Mysteries concludes that 1930s modernists understood neoclassicism not as formalist compositional approaches but rather as a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past and promissory visions of the future.

Here, Levitz demonstrates how a group of collaboratoring artists - Igor Stravinsky, Ida Rubenstein, Jacques Copeau, André Gide and others - used the myth of Perséphone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art.

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.

First published in 1910, “Ancient Mysteries and Modern Revelations” explores religion and its influences throughout human history and culture, considering the differences and similarities between different religious beliefs and legends from the earliest times to modernity. This fascinating volume will appeal to those with an interest in mankind's relationship with religion, as well as the development of ideas connected with the subject. Contents include: “Bibles Under Modern searchlight”, “Rivers of the Life or Faiths of Man in All Lands”, “Ancient and Modern Ideas of Revelation”, “Various Spiritual Elements in the Bible and Classic Literature”, “Creation Legends—How Ancient is Humanity on this Plant?”, “Hindu Chronology”, “Egypt and Its Wonders: Literally and Mystically Considered”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.

Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys explores the postcolonial significance of Rhys’s modernist period work, which depicts an urban scene more varied than that found in other canonical representations of the period. Arguing against the view that Rhys comes into her own as a colonial thinker only in the post-WWII period of her career, this study examines the austere insights gained by Rhys’s active cultivation of her fringe status vis-à-vis British social life and artistic circles, where her sharp study of the aporias of marginal lives and the violence of imperial ideology is distilled into an artistic statement positing the outcome of the imperial venture as a state of homelessness across the board, for colonized and ‘metropolitans’ alike. Bringing to view heretofore overlooked émigré populations, or their children, alongside locals, Rhys’s urbanites struggle to construct secure lives not simply as a consequence of commodification, alienation, or voluntary expatriation, but also as a consequence of marginalization and migration. This view of Rhys’s early work asserts its vital importance to postcolonial studies, an importance that has been overlooked owing to an over hasty critical consensus that only one of her early novels contains significant colonial content. Yet, as this study demonstrates, proper consideration of colonial elements long considered only incidental illuminates a colonial continuum in Rhys’s work from her earliest publications.

Bringing together 17 foundational texts in contemporary modernist criticism in one accessible volume, this book explores the debates that have transformed the field of modernist studies at the turn of the millennium and into the 21st century. The New Modernist Studies Reader features chapters covering the major topics central to the study of modernism today, including: · Feminism, gender, and sexuality · Empire and race · Print and media cultures · Theories and history of modernism Each text includes an introductory summary of its historical and intellectual contexts, with guides to further reading to help students and teachers explore the ideas further. Includes essential texts by leading critics such as: Anne Anlin Cheng, Brent Hayes Edwards, Rita Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mark Goble, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, David James, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Mark S. Morrisson, Michael North, Jessica Pressman, Lawrence Rainey, Paul K. Saint-Amour, Bonnie Kime Scott, Urmila Seshagiri, Robert Spoo, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz.