Discovering Modernism

When Discovering Modernism was first published, it shed new and welcome light on the birth of Modernism. This reissue of Menand's classic intellectual history of T.S. Eliot and the singular role he played in the rise of literary modernism features an updated Afterword by the author, as well as a detailed critical appraisal of the progression of Eliot's career as a poet and critic. The new Afterword was adapted from Menand's critically lauded essay on Eliot in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Seven: Modernism and the New Criticism. Menand shows how Eliot's early views on literary value and authenticity, and his later repudiation of those views, reflect the profound changes regarding the understanding of literature and its significance that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. It will prove an eye-opening study for readers with an interest in the writings of T.S. Eliot and other luminaries of the Modernist era.

Shows how T S Eliot's early views on literary value and authenticity - and his later repudiation of those views - reflect the profound changes regarding the understanding of literature and its significance that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century.

In this study of Yeats' poetry between 1902 and 1916, Greaves strongly reacts to the tendency in literary criticism to categorize Yeats' work as 'modernist', Instead, Greaves offer a different way of looking at the transition in Yeats' work in this period, by examining the poems in the context of Yeats' life. As a result, the figure of Yeats the poet is resurrected from the exhaustive category of 'modernism' and the complex connections between the figure of Yeats within the poems and its relationship with the Yeats who exists outside them is revealed.

This book tests critical reassessments of US radical writing of the 1930s against recent developments in theories of modernism and the avant-garde. Multidisciplinary in approach, it considers poetry, fiction, classical music, commercial art, jazz, and popular contests (such as dance marathons and bingo). Relating close readings to social and economic contexts over the period 1856–1952, it centers in on a key author or text in each chapter, providing an unfolding, chronological narrative, while at the same time offering nuanced updates on existing debates. Part One focuses on the roots of the 1930s proletarian movement in poetry and music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part Two analyzes the output of proletarian novelists, considered alongside contemporaneous works by established modernist authors as well as more mainstream, popular titles.

We often think of Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers' Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience - thus transforming a little-read "e;highbrow"e; movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from "e;high"e; to "e;low"e;) but also spatial - since publisher's series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language - a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism will be of interest to all those who want to know how the new literature became a global commercial hit.

One of the first studies to explore the relationship between environmental criticism and British modernism, Green Modernism explores the cultural function of nature in the modernist novel between 1900 and 1930. This theoretically engaged, historically informed book brings new materialist insights to novels by Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, and Butts.

Examining the ways the publishing experiences of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence affected their fiction, Wexler draws on diverse sources of evidence to challenge some of the myths of modernism.

This book brings together thirteen distinguished critics and scholars to explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented influence on the evolution of modern art. It shows that children's art and childhood have inspired major works of art, served as central metaphors for artistic spontaneity and honesty, and provided a window into the fundamental human qualities explored by modern artists. The volume complements editor Jonathan Fineberg's groundbreaking new book, The Innocent Eye (Princeton, 1997), in which he showed how many of the greatest masters of modern art collected and were directly influenced by children's drawings. Contributors here both expand on Fineberg's themes and take the study of children's art in new directions. They examine, for example, the influence of child art on such artists as Kandinsky, Klee, Larionov, and Miró; the diverse styles of children's art; the influence of Romantic ideas on perceptions of children's art; the conception of giftedness versus education in children's drawings; and the relationship between children's art and primitivism. The book offers unique glimpses into the working processes of great modern artists, presenting, for example, Dora Vallier's personal recollections of Miró and his creative process, and new documentation about the works of the Russian avant-garde. The essays draw on art theory, psychology, and the close study of individual works of art and written texts. Discovering Child Art will appeal to a wide range of readers, including art historians, psychologists, and art educators. Contributors to the book are Troels Andersen, Rudolf Arnheim, John Carlin, Marcel Franciscono, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Green, Josef Helfenstein, Werner Hofmann, Yuri Molok, G. G. Pospelov, Richard Shiff, Dora Vallier, and Barbara Würwag.