Familiar narratives about the nature of English modernism, "tradition," and "periodization," together with the "literary" character of English art from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, are abandoned in this innovative and important book. In their stead, David Peters Corbett proposes a new way of looking at this painting from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Vorticists.

Arguing that art history has been too reluctant to confront the fundamental question of how and what the consistency and application of paint signifies, Corbett investigates the work of English...

Familiar narratives about the nature of English modernism, "tradition," and "periodization," together with the "literary" character of English art from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, are abandoned in this innovative and important book. In their stead, David Peters Corbett proposes a new way of looking at this painting from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Vorticists.

Arguing that art history has been too reluctant to confront the fundamental question of how and what the consistency and application of paint signifies, Corbett investigates the work of English...

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud observed that the life-enhancing pleasure principle seems disrupted by something internal to the psyche. He took into account the possibility of a "death instinct" bent on returning the living organism to its origin of undifferentiated matter. In Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Margaret Iversen uses the writing of Freud, Lacan, the Surrealists, and Roland Barthes to elaborate a theory of art beyond the pleasure principle. Lacan was in close contact with the Surrealists and, early in his career, exchanged ideas with Dali....

Though the work of Irish writers has been paramount in conventional accounts of literary modernism, Ireland itself only rarely occupies a meaningful position in accounts of modernism's historical trajectory. With an itinerary moving not simply among Dublin, Belfast, and London but also Paris, New York, Addis Ababa, Rome, Berlin, Geneva, and the world's radio receivers, Ireland and the Problem of Information examines the pivotal mediations through which social knowledge was produced in the mid-twentieth century. Organized as a series of cross-fading case studies, the book argues...

All too often, the historical avant-garde is taken to be incommensurate with and antithetical to the world inhabited by the museum. In The Curatorial Avant-Garde, by contrast, Adam Jolles demonstrates the surrealists' radical transformation of the ways in which spectators encountered works of art between the wars. From their introduction in Paris in 1925, surrealist exhibitions dissolved the conventional boundaries between visual media, language, and the space of public display. This intrusion--by a group of amateur curators, with neither formal training nor professional...

This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices.

Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of "nature's experiments"--the belief that...

In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected "elitist" mediums and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life.

Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies--the "engineer" and "bricoleur"--illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and artists on the movement's margins who deployed a wide range of clever make-do tactics. Walworth explores the relationships of...