The European Avant-garde: 1900-1940

by Andrew J. Webber

Overview

This book offers an informative and accessible cultural history of the European avant-garde in its early twentieth-century heyday. It provides comparative coverage of cultural experimentation across the major European languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Spanish and Italian.

Andrew Webber presents striking examples to illustrate a time of unprecedented experiment and energetic performance in all aspects of culture. Readings of some of the most important and characteristic avant-garde texts, pictures and films are set against some of the key developments of the period: advances in technology and psychology; the rise of radical politics; the cultural ferment of the modern metropolis; and the upheaval in issues of gender and sexuality. The author’s mediation between a variety of cultural forms, combining political and psychoanalytical modes of understanding, evokes the richness of the age in a manner that students will find both illuminating and provocative.

This volume will be an excellent textbook for courses on the avant-garde in departments of comparative cultural studies, literature and film studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745627052
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	09/03/2004
Series:	Cultural History of Literature , #8
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Andrew J. Webber is University Senior Lecturer in German and Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge.

Table of Contents

List of Plates.

Preface.

1. Introduction: The Historical Avant-garde and Cultural History.

2. Manifestations: The Public Sphere.

3. Writing the City: Urban Technology and Poetic Technique.

4. Modes of Performance: Film-Theatre.

5. Case Histories: Narratives of the Avant-garde.

Conclusion: Allegories of the Avant-garde.

Epilogue: After the Avant-garde?.

Notes.

Index.

Editorial Reviews

‘“This is not a Cultural History of theAvant-Garde”: the section title, teasing Magritte’spipe, says it perfectly. Like the famous painting, this bookis more, namely a beautiful blend of history and analysis,criticism and theory, in my favorite phrase: cultural analysis. If,after reading it, it is as if one sees avant-garde all around, incontemporary culture, this is because Andrew Webber has made senseof the past in terms that reflect the urgency posed by the present.Tightly argued yet generously clear, abundantly illustrated withclose readings of specific works yet proposing an unambiguouslyinnovative reading of the early avant-garde as a state of cultureas a whole, this book will make you wish you had been among thefirst to see those trenchant texts and images that shocked theworld. Learning about the avant-garde, the reader also learns“how to”: how to read and understand, how to analyse,how to frame those texts that are so notoriously hard tograsp.’

Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam

‘Andrew J. Webber's superb new book looks at theconstitution of the avant-garde in early twentieth-century Europeanthought. Ranging from architecture and urban space to theatre andfilm, Webber's take on the avant-garde throws new light on itscontradictions and complexities. This is a book for all humanistsinterested in the formation of twentieth-century sensibilitiesacross the entire spectrum of modern cultural life.’SanderL. Gilman, University of Illinois at Chicago

From the Publisher