Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Visions For Modernity
Visions For Modernity
William Roberts, The Dancers (1919) Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.UK
Further Reading
Alongside Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents,
comprehensive resources on Modernism and Modern Art in general include:
Alison Lewis, Literary research and British modernism : strategies and sources
Plymouth, 2010); Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson (eds.), The Modern
Tradition (New York & London, 1965); Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.),
Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford &
Cambridge, Mass., 1992), as well as Peter Conrads panoramic study of the
period, Modern Times, Modern Places (New York, 1999).
There is an extensive bibliography by Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane (eds.), in Modernism 1890-1930 (Harmondsworth, rev. ed., 1989).
There are also useful author bibliographies in Boris Ford (ed.), The New
Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vols 7 &8 (London, 1988); A. C. Ward,
Longman Companion to Twentieth Century Literature (London, 1981); and
recurrent bibliographies in English Literature in Transition, Twentieth Century
Literature, PMLA, The Year's Work in English Studies, etc.
There is more detailed background on individual authors or individual texts
in volumes in the "Cambridge Companions Macmillan Casebooks, the
"Prentice-Hall Twentieth Century Views," the Methuen "Contemporary Writers"
series, the Macmillan "Women Writers" series, and the "Critical Heritage'
series. Also see the Harvester "Key Women Writers" series and the Penguin
"Lives Or Modern Women" series, ed. Emma Tennant.
Worthwhile general studies of the literature of the period include Hugh
Kenner, The Pound Era (London, 1972); Harry Blamires's Twentieth Century
English Literature (London, 2nd ed., 1982); Malcolm Bradbury, The Social
Context of Modern English Literature (Oxford, 1971); Maude Ellman's The Nets
of Modernism (Cambridge, 2010); lrving Howe's collection The Idea of the
Modern in Literature and the Arts (New York, 1967); Frank Kermode's brilliant,
Essays on Fiction, 1971-82 (London, 1983); Jos Ortega y Gasset, The
Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays (London, 1972); Perry Meisel, The
Myth of the Modern: A Study of British Literature and Criticism since 1850 (New
Haven/London, 1989); John Oliver Perry (ed.), Backgrounds to Modern
Literature (San Francisco, 1968); Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern
(London, 1963); William York Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature, 18851946 (New York, 1947); Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A
Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922 (Cambridge,1984); Raymond
Williams, Culture and Society, l780-1950 (London, 1959). Also useful are
Edmund Wilson's splendid internal study of the Modern movement, Axel's
Castle (New York, 1931), and Cyril Connolly's personal guide The Modern
Movement: 100 Key books from England, France and America, 1880-1950
(London, 1965).
For useful overviews, and digests of recent critical approaches, see Peter
Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London, 1995); The Cambridge
Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson, (Cambridge, 1999); A Concise
Companion to Modernism, ed David Bradshaw (Oxford, 2003). For short
introductions, see Peter Faulkner, Modernism, (London1977); Peter Childs,
Modernism (London & New York, 2000) and Steven Matthews, Modernism
(London, 2004). For a rigorous theoretical account, see Astradur Eysteinsson,
The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca and London, 1990).
For an invaluable study of the history of the period, see James Joll, Europe
Since 1870: An International History (London, 1990), and other important
historical works are E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-I914 (London,
1987), Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, 1979),
Norman Stone, Europe Transformed: 1878-19I8 (London, 1983), Barbara
Tuchman, The Proud Tower (London, 1966), and David Thomson, England in
the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth, 1970).
On the cultural transition from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, see
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1973); Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet
in the Era of High Capitalism (London, 1983); and One Way Street and Other
Writings (London, 1979). On the continuities between Romanticism and
Modernism, see Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (London,1957) and
John B. Beer, Romantic Influences: Contemporary - Victorian Modern
(Basingstoke, 1993). On the general shift from Symbolism to Modernism,
see M Decaudin, La Crise des valeurs symbolistes (Toulouse, 1960; rpt.
Geneva, 1981) and Lawrence M. Porter, The Crisis of French Symbolism
(Ithaca, NY, 1990).
On the technological and scientific changes of this period in relation to
artistic activity, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918
(London, 1983); Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A
Cultural Study (1998);Michael Whitworth, Einstein's Wake: Relativity, Metaphor
and Modernism (Oxford, 2001) and Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism:
Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (Cornell, 2002) The contrast between
artistic movements is also a matter of generational change, on which see
Carl F. Schorske, Fin de Sicle Vienna (Cambridge, 1981), and Rob Kohl, The
Generation of 1914 (London, 1980); or, alternatively, a matter of
psychological shift, on which see Peter Collier & Judy Davies (eds.),
Modernism and the European Unconscious (Cambridge, 1990).
The terms 'modernism', modernity, and 'modernit' can be used to cover a
wide range of post-1880 phenomena, including economic and bureaucratic
modernization. Marxist critique of Modernist art tends to privilege this social
context, viz. Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (London 1985) and
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London, 1985). On key
theorists of the Left, see Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Problems of Modernity:
Adorno & Benjamin (London 1989) and David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity