Mafarka The Futurist

"Dazzling and disturbing, Marinetti's 'great fire-brand novel' recounts the erotic and exotic exploits of the warlord Mafarka in a torrid and highly stylised North Africa. When the novel was first published (the French version in 1909, the Italian in 1910), it was banned for obscenity."--cover.

Biographical note: Sascha Bru, Genth University, Belgium; Peter Nicholls, University of Sussex, UK.

The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.

Drawing on recent feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, Cinzia Sartini Blum provides the first analysis of the rhetoric, politics, and psychology of gender in the avant-garde writings of the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti. Her book explores the relations between the seemingly unrelated goals of Italian Futurism: technical revolution, espousal of violence, avowed misogyny, and rejection of literary tradition. Blum argues for the centrality of the rhetoric of gender in Marinetti's work. She also investigates a diverse array of his futurist textual practices that range from formal experimentation with "words in freedom" to nationalist manifestos that advocate intervention in World War I and anticipate subsequent fascist rhetoric of power and virility. A major contribution to the study of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the first full-length study of Marinetti in English, The Other Modernism will interest all those concerned with twentieth-century literature, culture, and society and the problem of modern subjectivity.

Notions of crisis have long charged the study of the European avant-garde and modernism, reflecting the often turbulent nature of their development. Throughout their history, the avant-garde and modernists have both confronted and instigated crises, be they economic or political, aesthetic or philosophical, collective or individual, local or global, short or perennial. The seventh volume in the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies addresses the myriad ways in which the avant-garde and modernism have responded and related to crisis from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. How have Europe’s avant-garde and modernist movements given aesthetic shape to their crisis-laden trajectory? Given the many different watershed moments the avant-garde and modernism have faced over the centuries, what common threads link the critical points of their development? Alternatively, what kinds of crises have their experimental practices and critical modes yielded? The volume assembles case studies reflecting upon these questions and more from across all areas of avant-garde and modernist activity, including visual art, literature, music, architecture, photography, theatre, performance, curatorial practice, fashion and design.

The Handbook of International Futurism is the first reference work ever to presents in a comparative fashion all media and countries in which the movement, initiated by F.T. Marinetti in 1909, exercised a particularly noteworthy influence. The handbook offers a synthesis of the state of scholarship regarding the international radiation of Futurism and its influence in some fifteen artistic disciplines and thirty-eight countries. While acknowledging the great achievements of the movement in the visual and literary arts of Italy and Russia, it treats Futurism as an international, multidisciplinary phenomenon that left a lasting mark on the manifold artistic manifestations of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Hundreds of artists, who in some phase in their career absorbed Futurist ideas and stylistic devices, are presented in the context of their national traditions, their international connections and the media in which they were predominantly active. The handbook acts as a kind of multi-disciplinary, geographical encyclopaedia of Futurism and gives scholars with varying levels of experience a detailed overview of all countries and disciplines in which the movement had a major impact.

This publication offers for the first time an inter-disciplinary and comparative perspective on Futurism in a variety of countries and artistic media. 20 scholars discuss how the movement shaped the concept of a cultural avant-garde and how it influenced the development of modernist art and literature around the world.