The European Avant-garde: 1900-1940 [Hardcover]

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 authors 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.

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.

This is not a Cultural History of the Avant-Garde: the section title, teasing Magrittes pipe, says it perfectly. Like the famous painting, this book is more, namely a beautiful blend of lc!