1913 The Cradle of Modernism [Paperback]

This innovative book puts modernist literature in its cultural, intellectual, and global context, within the framework of the year 1913.

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• Broadens the analysis of canonical texts and artistic events by showing their cultural and global parallels
  
• Examines a number of simultaneous artistic, literary, and political endeavours including those of Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Du Bois and Stravinsky
  
• Explores Pound's Personae next to Apollinaire's Alcools and Rilke's Spanish Trilogy, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country next to Proust's Swann's Way

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Modernism, Crisis, and Early Globalization 1

1 The New in the Arts 18

2 Collective Agencies 46

3 Everyday Life and the New Episteme 72

4 Learning to be Modern in 1913 96

5 Global Culture and the Invention of the Other 118

6 The Splintered Subject of Modernism 141

7 At War with Oneself: The Last Cosmopolitan Travels of German and Austrian Modernism 164

8 Modernism and the End of Nostalgia 185

Conclusion: Antagonisms 208

Notes 217

Index 235

While reading Rabatk's book I constantly had in mind Theodor Adorno's remark to Walter Benjamin about the latter's habit of 'occult adjacentism'.  Adorno, of course, meant this as a damning criticism of his friend's method in the Arcades project, but it beautifully describes the effect of 1913 and its kaleidoscopic presentation of a world that troublingly-uncannily-intimates our olÃ-