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Modernism

An Anthology of Sources and Documents

From Bauhaus to Dada, from Virginia Woolf to John Dos Passos, the Modernist movement revolutionized the way we perceive, portray, and participate in the world. This landmark anthology is a comprehensive documentary resource for the study of Modernism, bringing together more than 150 key essays, articles, manifestos, and other writings of the political and aesthetic avant-garde between 1840 and 1950.

By favoring short extracts over lengthier originals, the editors cover a remarkable range and variety of modernist thinking. Included are not just the familiar high modernist landmarks such as Gustave Flaubert, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, but also a diverse representation from the sciences, politics, philosophy, and the arts, including Charles Darwin, Thorstein Veblen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Isadora Duncan, John Reed, Adolf Hitler, and Sergei Eisenstein. Another welcome feature is a substantial selection of hard-to-find manifestos from the many modernist movements, among them futurism, cubism, Dada, surrealism, and anarchism.

654 pages | 6 x 9 | © 1998

Art: Art--General Studies

History: History of Ideas

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Music: General Music

Table of Contents

Introduction
A note on presentation

Part I: The Emergence of the Modern

Ia: The modern in cultural, political and scientific thought
1. Karl Marx: From letter to Ruge, September 1843
2. Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels: From The Communist Manifesto 1848
3. Richard Wilhelm Wagner: From 'Art and Revolution' 1849
4. Charles Darwin: From The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 1859
5. Johann Jakob Bachofen: From Mother Right 1861
6. Friedrich Nietzsche: From Preface to Human, All Too Human 1878
7. Max Nordau: From Degeneration 1883
8. William Morris: From 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil' 1884
9. H.P.B.: From The Secret Doctrine 1888
10. J. G. Frazer: From The Golden Bough 1890-1915
11. Gustave Le Bon: From The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind 1895
12. Thorstein Veblen: From The Theory of the Leisure Class 1899
13. Henry Adams: From The Education of Henry Adams 1907
14. Sigmund Freud: From The Interpretation of Dreams 1900
15. Georg Simmel: From 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' 1903
16. August Bebel: From Woman Under Socialism 1904
17. W. E. B. Dubois: From The Souls of Black Folk 1903
18. Henri Bergson: From Creative Evolution 1907
19. Wilhelm Worringer: From Abstraction and Empathy 1908
20. Adolf Loos: From 'Ornament and Crime' 1908
21. Karl Kraus: 'The Good Conduct Medal' 1909
22. Millicent Garrett Fawcett: From 'Women's Suffrage' 1911
23. Lou Andreas-Salomé: From The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salome 1912, 1913
24. Oswald Spengler: From The Decline of the West 1918-22

Ib: Modern aesthetics
1. Edgar Allan Poe: From review of Nathanial Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales 1842
2. Walt Whitman: From Preface to Leaves of Grass 1855
3. Gustave Flaubert: From letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 March 1857
4. Matthew Arnold: From 'On the Modern Element in Literature' 1857
5. Charles Baudelaire: From 'The Painter of Modern Life' 1859-60
6. Arthur Rimbaud: From letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871
7. John Ruskin: From Lectures on Art 1870; From Arartra Pentelici 1872
8. Walter Pater: From Conclusion to The Renaissance [1873] 1893
9. August Strindberg: From Preface to Miss Julie 1888
10. Oscar Wilde: Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890
11. Thomas Hardy: 'The Science of Fiction' 1891
12. Stéphane Mallarmé: From 'Crisis in Poetry' 1886-95
13. Paul Valéry: From 'Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci' 1895
14. Alfred Jarry: 'Preliminary Address at the First Performance of Ubi Roi, 10 December 1896'
15. Joseph Conrad: From Preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' 1897
16. Arthur Symons: From The Symbolist Movement in Literature 1899
17. W. B. Yeats: From 'The Symbolism of Poetry' 1900
18. Marcel Proust: From 'Days of Reading: I' 1905
19. William Archer: From 'Henrik Ibsen: Philosopher or Poet' 1905
20. Henry James: From 'The Art of Fiction' 1894; From Preface to The Princess Casamassima 1906
21. Edward Gordon Craig: From 'The Actor and the über-marionette' 1907
22. Isadora Duncan: From My Life 1927
23. George Bernard Shaw: From The Sanity of Art 1908

II: The Avant-Garde

IIa. Formulations and declarations
1. Gustave Courbet: From Realist Manifesto 1855
2. émile Zola: From 'Naturalism on the Stage' 1880
3. Desmond MacCarthy: 'The Post-Impressionists' 1910
4. T.E. Hulme: From 'Romanticism and Classicism' 1911
5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: From The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture 1911
6. Roger Fry: 'The French Group' 1912
7. Clive Bell: 'The English Group' 1912
8. Robert Delaunay: 'Light' 1912; 'Notes on the Construction of the Reality of Pure Painting' 1912
9. Erik Satie: 'The Musician's Day' 1913; 'Some Notes on Modern Music' 1919
10. Wyndham Lewis: From 'The Cubist Room' 1914
11. Karl Kraus: From 'In These Great Times' 1914
12. Richard Huelsenbeck: From 'Zurich 1916, as it really was' 1928
13. Guillaume Apollinaire: 'Art and the War: Concerning an Allied Exhibition' 1916; Programme for Parade, 18 May 1917
14. Antonio Gramsci: 'Marinetti the Revolutionary' 1916; 'Theatre and Cinema' 1921
15. Victor Shklovsky: From 'Art as Technique' 1917
16. John Reed: From Ten Days That Shook the World 1919
17. 'A Member of the Audience: Storming the Winter Palace' 1920
18. Georg Lukács: From The Theory of the Novel 1920
19. Leon Trotsky: From Literature and Revolution 1923
20. Alexandra Kollontai: From 'Make Way for the Winged Eros' 1923
21. Dziga Vertov: From 'A Kino-Eye Discussion' 1924
22. Luis Buñuel: 'Suburbs' 1923
23. Vsevolod Meyerhold: From 'The Reconstruction of the Theatre' 1929
24. Erwin Piscator: From 'Basic Principles of Sociological Drama' 1929

IIb: Manifestos

1. Futurism
1a. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: 'The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909'; The Variety Theatre' 1913
1b. Ilya Zdanevich and Mikhail Larionov: 'Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto' 1913
2. Mina Loy: 'Feminist Manifesto' 1914
3. Cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire: From The Cubist Painters 1913
4. Imagism: Preface to Some Imagist Poets 1915
5. Expressionism: Wassily Kandinsky: From 'The Problem of Form' 1912
6. Dada
6a. Tristan Tzara: From 'Dada Manifesto, 1918'; 'Note on Art' 1917; 'Note on Negro Art' 1917
6b. Kurt Shwitters: From Merz 1921; From 'Consistent Poetry' 1924; 'To All the Theatres of the World' 1926
6c. George Grosz with Wieland Herzfelde: From 'Art is in Danger'
7. Vorticism: From Blast 1914
8. Eccentrism: The Eccentric Manifesto
9. Constructivism
9a. Aleksei Gan: From Constructivism 1922
9b. László Moholy-Nagy: 'Constructivism and the Proletariat'
10. Bauhaus
10a. Walter Gropius: 'Manifesto of the Bauhaus, April 1919'
10b. Annelise Fleischmann: From 'Economic Living' 1924
10c. László Moholy-Nagy: 'The New Typography' 1923
10d. Oscar Schlemmer: Diary Extract 1927
11. Manifesto Issued by the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, Mexico City, 1922
12 LEF Manifesto
13 Surrealism: André Breton: From the First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924
14.transition: Eugene Jolas: 'Suggestions for a New Magic' 1927; 'Proclamation' 1929
15. Anarchism: Alexander Berkman: From The ABC of Anarchism 1929

III. Modernists on the Modern

IIIa. The 1910s and 1920s: The making of Modernist traditions

1. (Margaret) Strom Jameson: From 'England's Nest of Singing Birds'
2. Ford Maddox Ford: From 'On Impressionism' 1914
3. Dora Marsden: From 'I Am.' 1915
4. Fernando Pessoa: From 'Notes on Sensation' 1916
5. John Dos Passos: 'Against American Literature' 1916
6. W. B. Yeats: From 'Anima Hominis' 1917
7. Amy Lowell: From Preface to Tendencies in Modernist Poetry 1917
8. William Carlos Williams: From Prologue to Kora in Hell 1918
9. May Sinclair: From a review of Pilgrimmage 1918
10. Edwin Muir: From 'What is Modern?' 1918
11. E. M. Forester: From 'The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy' 1919
12. Katherine Mansfield: From reviews for the Athenaeum 1919
13 Thomas Mann: From Diaries 1918, 1919, 1920
14. T. S. Eliot: From 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' 1919; From 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth' 1923
15. Ezra Pound: From 'A Retrospect' 1918: From a Preface to Rémy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love 1926
16. H. D.: From 'Notes on Thought and Vision' 1919
17. Alfred Döblin: From 'Warsaw' 1922
18. Herman Hesse: 'Recent German Poetry'
19. Virginia Woolf: 'The Moment: Summer's Night' 1927: From 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' 1924: From 'Modern Fiction' 1919
20. James Joyce: Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 15 August 1925
21. Richard Adlington: From 'The Influence of Mr. James Joyce' 1921
22. Carl Jung: From 'Ulysses: ein Monolog' 1932
23. Frank Budgen: From James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses' 1934
24. D. H. Lawrence: Leter to A. W. Macleod, 2 June 1914: From letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914: From preface to the American edition of New Poems 1929
25. Alain Locke: From the Introduction to The New Negro 1925
26. Langston Hughes: From 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' 1926
27. Gertrude Stein: From 'Composition as Explanation' 1926
28. Hugh MacDiarmid: From 'English Ascendency in British Literature' 1931
29 Marianne Moore: 'New Poetry Since 1912' 1926
30. Robert Graves and Laura (Riding) Jackson: From Modernist Poetry 1926
31. F. Scott Fitzgerald: From 'Echoes of he Jazz Age' 1931
32. Robert McAlmon: From Being Geniuses Together 1920-1930 1938
33. Vladimir Dixon: 'A Letter to James Joyce' 1929
34. Samuel Beckett: From 'Dante ... Bruno . Vico .. Joyce' 1929: From Proust 1931

IIIb The 1930s: Modernist regroupings

1. Siegfried Kracauer: From 'The Mass Ornament' 1927
2. Max Horkheimer: From 'The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research' 1931
3. Bertolt Brecht: From 'The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre' 1930
4. Antonin Artaud: 'Theatre and Cruelty' 1933
5. Sigmund Freud: From 'The Dissection of the Phsychical Personality' 1933
6. Nathanael West: 'Some Notes on Violence' 1932: 'Some Notes on Miss L.' 1933
7. Laura (Riding) Jackson: From The Word 'Woman' 1934-35
8. Dorothy M. Richardson: Foreword to Pilgrimmage 1938
9. Cecil Day Lewis: From A Hope for Poetry 1934
10. T. S. Eliot: From The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 1933
11. Ezra Pound: From 'Prefatio Aut Cimicium Tumulus' 1933
12. F. R. Leavis: From New Bearings in English Poetry 1932
13. W. H. Auden: Review of Leavis et al. 1933: From Introduction to The Poet's Tongue 1935
14. W. B. Yeats: From Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 1936
15. Michael Roberts: From Introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Verse 1936
16. Wallace Stevens: From 'The Irrational Element in Poetry' 1936
17. George Dangerfield: From The Strange Death of Liberal England 1935
18. Andrei Zhadanov: From speech at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers 1934
19. Herbert Read: From 'What is Revolutionary Art' 1935
20. Eric Gill: 'All Art Is Propaganda' 1935
21. Christina Stead: From 'The Writers Take Sides' 1935
22. Lewis Grassic Gibbon: 'Note', A Scots Quair 1932-34
23. James Barke: From 'Lewis Grassic Gibbon' 1935-36
24. Neil M. Gunn: 'Scotland a Nation' 1935-36
25. William Phillips and Philip Rahv: From 'Recent Problems of Revolutionary Literature' 1935
26. John Dos Passos: 'The Writer as Technician' 1935
27. John Cornford: From 'Left?' 1933-34
28. Sergei Eisenstein: From 'A Dialectic Approach to Film Form' 1929
29. Storm Jameson: From 'Documents' 1937
30. Adolf Hitler: From speech inaugerating the 'Great Exhibition of German Art', Munich 1937
31. Walter Benjamin: From 'Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellegentsia' 1929: From 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' 1936
32. Theodor Adorno: From letter to Walter Benjamin, 18 March 1936: From 'On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening' 1938
33. Georg Lukács: From 'Realism in the Balance' 1938
34. Ernst Bloch: From The Principle of Hope 1938-47
35. David Alfaro Siqueiros: From 'Letter from teh Front Line in Spain' 1938
36. André Breton, Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera: 'Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art' 1938
37. Eugene Jolas et al.: From 'Inquiry into Spirit and Language of the Night' 1938
38. George Orwell: From 'Inside the Whale' 1933
39. Virginia Wolfe: From 'The Leaning Tower' 1940
40. Richard Wright: From 'How "Bigger" Was Born' 1940

Copyright acknowledgements

Index

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