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This book sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left–right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the anti-modern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. This book argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.

This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.

This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Yet both of these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The present book accordingly traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as its point of departure, the book examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, if not beyond, certain works of European modernist art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews have nevertheless been interpreted as somehow Jewish, or, more precisely, Jewified. This book argues that these strange interpretations, although hostile toward and often deliberately incomprehending of their object, need to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. To grasp why, it suggests we turn our attention away from the dominant scholarly preoccupation with abject Jewish bodies and toward the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit, a spirit identified both with modernity and regression to an ancient past. The book tracks how this fantasy unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” and then turns to James Joyce, Theodor Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.

Frank O'Hara's writing is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. This book asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O'Hara's distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.

This book looks at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, it fundamentally revises our understanding of modernism's cultural and political history. The book brings together a wide range of European experimental writers and provides detailed analyses of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen. It locates these writers within their exceptional democratic context and demonstrates how the modernist avant-garde, during the First World War and the upheavals that followed, found itself caught up in a series of ‘states of exception’. In such states, legal democratic institutions were bracketed and set aside, and ‘literature’ as an autonomous realm was temporarily suspended. Faced with extreme forms of politicisation, avant-gardists throughout Europe tried to safeguard literature's autonomy in a variety of ways. These included turning politics and law into genuinely artistic materials and producing a repertoire of alternatives to existent frameworks of democracy. Against assertions that anti-art avant-garde gestures were meant to overcome art's autonomy and approximate the condition of politics, the book shows that European avant-gardists may well have been some of the staunchest defenders of art's sovereignty in modern times.

This is a complete study of the works of the Irish playwright, travel writer, and poet J. M. Synge (1871–1909). A key and controversial figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and specifically in the Abbey Theatre, Synge’s career was short but dynamic. Moving from an early Romanticism, through Decadence, and on to a combative, protesting modernism, the development of Synge’s drama was propelled by his contentious relationship with the Irish politics of his time. This book is a full and timely reappraisal of Synge’s works, exploring both the prose and the drama through an in-depth study of Synge’s archive. Rather than looking at Synge’s work in relation to any distinct subject, this study examines Synge’s aesthetic and philosophical values, and charts the challenges posed to them as the impetus behind his reluctant movement into a more modernist mode of writing. Along the way, the book sheds new and often surprising light on Synge’s interests in occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, modernization, and even his late satirical engagement with eugenics. One of its key innovations is the use of Synge’s diaries, letters, and notebooks to trace his reading and to map the influences buried in his work, calling for them to be read afresh. Not only does this book reconsider each of Synge’s major works, along with many unfinished or archival pieces, it also explores the contested relationship between Revivalism and modernism, modernism and politics, and modernism and Romanticism.

Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.