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2 results

  • 20 - The Limits of an American Modernist Avant-Garde

  • from Part II - Forms, Genre, and Media
  • Edited by Mark Whalan, University of Oregon
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Modernism
    Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023, pp 349-363

  • Summary

    Why is conceptualizing an American avant-garde particularly problematic? How productive is the term “avant-garde” for understanding the development of American modernism? As a concept, the “avant-garde” was defined almost entirely by theorists affiliated in various ways with the Frankfurt School using examples and with political expectations forged in western Europe. Various political and historical assumptions led to theories framing American modernist aesthetics as an impoverished variant of the European model. This chapter begins with a survey of some important theories of the avant-garde before considering the classic American modernist avant-garde – the years 1914–17 in Greenwich Village, New York City – as a case study, using poet William Carlos Williams as its touchstone. Evaluated from the perspective of European accounts, it suggests some limitations to the predominantly European framework of the avant-garde in illuminating American modernism with the example of another American poet: Hart Crane.

  • 24 - Henry James (1843–1916)

  • from V - Some major critics of the period
  • Edited by M. A. R. Habib, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    07 February 2013, pp 440-463

  • Summary

    This chapter offers a succinct account of avant-garde activity in Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. In France, and especially in Paris, artistic innovation had been nurtured since at least the 1880s, under the aegis of Decadence, Symbolism and Impressionism. The war in Europe and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought a dramatic impetus to the Russian avant-gardists, who strove to assert their relevance to the contemporary situation. In fact, the pragmatic politics of the Bolsheviks set them an impossible challenge, pressurizing them to justify their art-making. Vorticism in England was a brief and rather self-conscious offshoot of Italian Futurism. The short-lived phenomenon known as Dadaism represents a case of an almost ubiquitous European avant-garde movement. One of Dadaism's defining characteristics was its antagonism to the narrow nationalism which underlay the conflicts of the First World War.