Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde

Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-0-521-83589-3
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 596 g

Edward Comentale exposes the links between art, literature and early twentieth-century capitalism. Comentale shows how apparently progressive avant-garde movements in their celebration of individualism, competition and labor worked hand in hand with a market defined by a monstrous increase in production and consumption. Most importantly, he unearths an alternative modernist practice based on a special kind of production that both critiques and challenges economic production at large. He goes on to argue that the British avant-garde, which has often been criticized for its emphasis on classical stasis and restraint, sought to halt this market activity and to think of less destructive ways of communal belonging. Comentale provides an interdisciplinary study examining art and sculpture as well as writing by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and H. D. among others, in the light of psychoanalytic, economic and political theory. This book will be of interest to scholars of literary and cultural modernism.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Comentale, Edward P.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: On the nature of being otherwise; Part I. Critique: 1. Fascism and/or liberalism: the avant-garde and modern capital; 2. 'No end, but addition': T. S. Eliot and the tragic economy of high modernism; Part II. Construction: 3. The modern temple: T. E. Hulme and the construction of classicism; 4. 'A fairly horrible business': labor, World War I, and the production of modern art; 5. Thesmophoria: suffragettes, sympathetic magic, and feminist classicism.

Über Autor(innen)

Comentale, Edward P.
Edward P. Comentale is Assistant Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Indiana University. He is the author of articles on International Modernism, the avant-garde, and twentieth-century film.