Sascha Bru

David Ayers

Li Lin

Kate Kangaslahti

Iveta Slavkova

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 Avant-Garde and Modernism in Critical Modes

Crisis

Focusing principally on the novel, this book treats works that are regarded as modernist alongside non-modernist and popular forms. These texts are examined within the context of social concerns, including gender, class politics, and the empire.

English Literature of the 1920s

Benedikt Hjartarson

Harri Veivo

Tomi Huttunen

Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?

The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life

Utopia

Moritz Baßler

Ursula Frohne

The historical avant-gardes defined themselves largely in terms of their relationship to various versions of realism. At first glance modernism primarily seems to take a counter-position against realism, yet a closer investigation reveals that these relations are more complex. This book is dedicated to the links between realism, modernism and the avant-garde in their international context from the late 19th century up to the present day.

Realisms of the Avant-Garde

Françoise Nicol

Jean-Pierre Montier

The effort to go beyond given knowledge in different domains – artistic, scientific, political, metaphysical – is a characteristic driving force in modernism and the avant-gardes. Since the late 19th century, artists and writers have frequently investigated their medium and its limits, pursued political and religious aims, and explored hitherto unknown physical, social and conceptual spaces, often in ways that combine these forms of critical inquiry into one and provoke further theoretical and methodological innovations. The fifth volume of the EAM series casts light on the history and actuality of investigations, quests and explorations in the European avant-garde and modernism from the late 19th century to the present day. The authors seek to answer questions such as: How have modernism and the avant-garde appropriated scientific knowledge, religious dogmas and social conventions, pursuing their investigation beyond the limits of given knowledge and conceptions? How have modernism and avant-garde created new conceptual models or representations where other discourses have allegedly failed? In what ways do practises of investigation, quest or exploration shape artistic work or the formal and thematic structures of artworks?

Investigation, Quest and Exploration in Modernism and the Avant-Gardes

Beyond Given Knowledge

Adam Hanna

Wyndham Lewis and Western Man

Sarah Posman

Anne Reverseau

It has often been argued that the arrival of the early-20th-century avant-gardes and modernisms coincided with an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing. The European historical avant-gardes and modernisms excelled in their attempts to establish the specificity of media and art forms as well as in experimenting with the hybridity of the materials of their multiple disciplines. This third volume of the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies sheds light on the full range and import of this aspect in avant-garde and modernist aesthetics across all art forms and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The book’s contributions, written by experts from some 20 countries, seek to answer the following questions: What sort of objects and material, works and media help us to properly grasp the avant-garde and modernist “aesthetics of matter”? How were affects, emotions and sensory and bodily experiences transferred and transformed in the experiment with matter? How were “immaterial” things such as concepts of time changed in this aesthetic moment? What “material meanings” were disseminated in the cultural transfer and translation of objects? How did subsequent avant-gardes deal with the “aesthetics of matter” in their response to historical predecessors?

Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange

The Aesthetics of Matter

David Ayers

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