Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern / Edition 1

by Janet Lyon

Overview

For more than three hundred years, manifestoes have defined the aims of radical groups, individuals, and parties while galvanizing revolutionary movements. As Janet Lyon shows, the manifesto is both a signal genre of political modernity and one of the defining forms of aesthetic modernism. Ranging from the pamphlet wars of seventeenth-century England to dyke and ACT-UP manifestoes of the 1990s, her extraordinarily accomplished book offers the first extended treatment of this influential form of discourse.

Lyon demonstrates that the manifesto, usually perceived as the very model of rhetorical transparency, is in fact a complex, ideologically inflected genre—one that has helped to shape modern consciousness. Lyon explores the development of the genre during periods of profound historical crisis. The French Revolution generated broadsides that became templates for the texts of Chartism, the Commune, and late-nineteenth-century anarchism, while in the twentieth century the historical avant-garde embraced a revolutionary discourse that sought in the manifesto's polarizing polemics a means for disaggregating and publicizing radical artistic movements. More recently, in the manifestoes of the 1960s, the wretched of the earth called for either the full realization or the final rejection of the idea of the universal subject, paving the way for contemporary contestations of identity among second- and third-wave feminists and queer activists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801485916
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	04/27/1999
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Janet Lyon is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies and Co-director of the Disability Studies Program at Pennsylvania State University.

What People are Saying About This

Stephen Watt

This is a wonderful book. Anyone interested in revolutions—aesthetic, political, sexual—and the way they are represented by their most ardent proponents will want to read Janet Lyon's Manifestoes.

Susan Stanford Friedman

Janet Lyon's genre study of manifestoes and modernity has an impressively ambitious reach—from the Diggers and Levellers to the feminist SCUM and cyborgianism. She posits telling conjunctures between aesthetics and politics, avant-gardism and feminism, in such historical moments as Republican France, literary modernism, and second-wave feminism. The result is a fresh, new reading of manifestoes as a revolutionary form of discourse interwoven with the history of feminism and inseparable from the formation of the modern subject in the West.

Rita Felski

A major, ground-breaking work of scholarship regarding the centrality of the manifesto to the political and aesthetic contradictions of modernity. From its opening pages, the book reveals itself as a lucid, confident and carefully argued piece of work, written with real elegance and elan. Lyon succeeds admirably in showing the connections between issues that have often been treated in isolation, such as revolutionary rhetoric, aesthetic theory, feminism, and the public sphere.

Editorial Reviews

Brilliantly nuanced and historically rich... Janet Lyon's acute weaving of modernist history, manifestic dissent, avant-garde aesthetics, and feminist struggle is gracefully learned, supple, and exciting. We are left with an entirely fresh sense of the extent to which the public spheres of modernity permitted their linguistic and political freedoms.

-- "Yearbook of English Studies"

Lyon offers an innovative, far-ranging study... A complex, lucid, and nuanced study of the manifesto as the signature genre of aesthetic and political militancy, this volume will be indispensible to all college and university collections.

-- "Choice"

This book is suggestive in its argument and expansive in its topics... Recommended for all readers who are interested in the history of political modernism.

-- "Virginia Quarterly Review"

This book provides compelling histories and analysis for scholars of media and social movements to mine for inspiration.

-- "Journal of Communication"

From the Publisher

This book is suggestive in its argument and expansive in its topics... Recommended for all readers who are interested in the history of political modernism.

Virginia Quarterly Review

Brilliantly nuanced and historically rich... Janet Lyon's acute weaving of modernist history, manifestic dissent, avant-garde aesthetics, and feminist struggle is gracefully learned, supple, and exciting. We are left with an entirely fresh sense of the extent to which the public spheres of modernity permitted their linguistic and political freedoms.

Yearbook of English Studies

This book provides compelling histories and analysis for scholars of media and social movements to mine for inspiration.

Journal of Communication

Lyon offers an innovative, far-ranging study... A complex, lucid, and nuanced study of the manifesto as the signature genre of aesthetic and political militancy, this volume will be indispensible to all college and university collections.

Choice

"This is a wonderful book. Anyone interested in revolutions—aesthetic, political, sexual—and the way they are represented by their most ardent proponents will want to read Janet Lyon's Manifestoes."

Stephen Watt

"Janet Lyon's genre study of manifestoes and modernity has an impressively ambitious reach—from the Diggers and Levellers to the feminist SCUM and cyborgianism. She posits telling conjunctures between aesthetics and politics, avant-gardism and feminism, in such historical moments as Republican France, literary modernism, and second-wave feminism. The result is a fresh, new reading of manifestoes as a revolutionary form of discourse interwoven with the history of feminism and inseparable from the formation of the modern subject in the West."

Susan Stanford Friedman

"A major, ground-breaking work of scholarship regarding the centrality of the manifesto to the political and aesthetic contradictions of modernity. From its opening pages, the book reveals itself as a lucid, confident and carefully argued piece of work, written with real elegance and elan. Lyon succeeds admirably in showing the connections between issues that have often been treated in isolation, such as revolutionary rhetoric, aesthetic theory, feminism, and the public sphere."

Rita Felski