Sanja Bahun-Radunović

Marinos Pourgouris

The collection of essays The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of the Modernist Avant-garde refigures the critical and historical picture of the modernist avant-garde by introducing a variety of less-commonly discussed geo-artistic sites and dynamics. The contributors explore the multifaceted relations established between the avant-garde â oecentersâ (France, Germany, England, and others) and their counterparts in the cultural â oeperipheryâ (Greece, India, Japan, Poland, Quebec, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia), as well as the unique artistic and literary dialogues which these encounters engendered. The primary concern of the anthology is the set of relations established between the center and the margin, the redefinition of which was pivotal for the formulation of the modernist avant-garde aesthetic project itself. While enriching the kaleidoscopic picture of modernism, the essays in this collection also offer new methodological approaches to this polychrome cultural image. In this way, the collection avoids the pitfalls of both the traditional diffusionist/Eurocentric model of the world and the more recent over-relativization of the positions of the margin and the center. In their stead, the anthology proposes a hermeneutics of encounter that is simultaneously â oespatialâ and â oehistorical, â aware of its limits but convinced of its own necessity.

New Territories of Modernism

The Avant-garde and the Margin

V. G. Julie Rajan

How women artists and activists across the globe employ myth to communicate personal and historical experiences of violence is the central concern of this innovative collection. Rather than compartmentalizing women's artistic production within generic or geographical boundaries, the volume encompasses literary criticism, discussion of film and art, artwork, autobiographical accounts and pieces of original creative writing, thereby promulgating an inclusive way to approach literature and the arts.

New Cassandras

Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text

V.G. Julie Rajan

From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production is an innovative collection of essays on female aesthetic production and myth, examining the ways in which women artists and writers utilize myth to negotiate their perceptions of feminine identity and feminine representation in an increasingly complex and culturally hybrid world. The featured essays and artistic contributions address a variety of contemporary female productions, including literature, performance, and visual art, in a markedly global scope. Representing a wide range of cultures, languages, geographic locales, and social contexts—from Jewish-Hindu and Kenyan-German, through Irish, Italian, American, to Vietnamese folktales—this diversified selection underscores the agency of “the feminine gaze” across a historical and geopolitical span, a gaze through which myths from various cultures and different cultural amalgams speak to us with force and with significance. The potency of this gaze is linked to the potential of myth simultaneously to encompass and compress history, and to offer the result as a backdrop against which the move from word to canvas—or from a mythic tale to its aesthetic appropriation—is performed in female aesthetic production.

Sanja Bahun-Radunović

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