Traces of Modernism surveys the competing social and political visions that marked the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, and the complex relationships and connections between these visions. A host of international contributors consider an extensive range of philosophical and artistic ideologies--from Bauhaus and Italian futurism to plans for totalitarian state-building--that bloomed in the wake of the World War One and the ensuing worldwide revolutions. These ideologies developed amid the uneasy backdrop of new kinds of international cooperation that were periodically punctuated by sharp bursts of fervid nationalism. At the center of each essay in Traces of Modernism stands the image of the machine, a metaphor for technological innovation and new systems of order that stood unfortunately ready for corruption by forces of authoritarianism.

In this book, Kevin Rulo reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. He shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G.S. Street, the Sitwells, J.J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, Rulo remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

This study of modernism's high imperial, occult-exotic affiliations presents many well-known figures from the period 1880-1960 in a new light. Modernism and the Occult traces the history of modernist engagement with 'irregular', heterodox and imported knowledge.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Early Modernism is a uniquely integrated introduction to the great avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting at the beginning of this century, from the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada. In contrast to the overly literary focus of previous studies of modernism, this book highlights the interaction between the arts in this period. It traces the fundamental and interlinked re-examination of the languages of the arts brought about by Matisse, Picasso, Schoenberg, Eliot, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Ben, and many others, which led to radically new techniques, such as atonality, cubism, and collage. These changes are set in the context both of the art that preceded them and of a new and profound shift in ideas. Theories of the unconscious, the association of ideas, primitivism, and reliance upon an expressionist intuition led to a reshaped conception of personal identity, and Butler examines the representation of the modernist self in the work of figures including Mann, Joyce, Conrad, and Stravinsky. Accessible and wide-ranging, the book is lavishly illustrated with over sixty illustrations, many in color. It provides an elegant and incisive guide to a momentous period in the history of European art.

"Published on the occasion of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's presentation of the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939, March 17-July 29, 2007. Exhibition originally conceived by and first shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2006."--P. [iv].