Michael North offers a subtle reading of the issues by linking aesthetic modernism with an attempt in all these writers to resolve basic contradictions in modern liberalism. Though Yeats, Eliot, and Pound certainly attempted to resolve in art problems that could not be resolved in actuality, their very attempt resulted in a politicized aesthetic, one that confessed their inability to do so. The book includes accounts of the specific political activities of the three writers, reinterpretations of their critical theories in light of their politics, and rereadings of some of their major works,...

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists--including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David...

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists--including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David...

If art and science have one thing in common, it's a hunger for the new--new ideas and innovations, new ways of seeing and depicting the world. But that desire for novelty carries with it a fundamental philosophical problem: If everything has to come from something, how can anything truly new emerge? Is novelty even possible?
In Novelty, Michael North takes us on a dazzling tour of more than two millennia of thinking about the problem of the new, from the puzzles of the pre-Socratics all the way up to the art world of the 1960s and '70s. The terms of the debate, North shows,...