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This study examines five modernists in different disciplines--biology, painting, drama, fiction, and anthropology--whose work on islands made them famous. Charles Darwin challenged every presumption of popular science with his theory of evolution by natural selection, derived from his study of the Galapagos Islands. Paul Gauguin found on Tahiti inspiration enough to break through the inhibiting traditions of the Parisian art world. John Millington Synge's experience on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland gave birth to a new style of drama that defied classic divisions between tragedy and comedy. D.H. Lawrence's life-long search for a utopian community culminated in his famous short story, "The Man Who Loved Islands," that poignantly portrays the tension between idealism and realism, solitude and human intimacy. Finally, Margaret Mead began her career in anthropology by studying the remote South Sea Islands and through her work acquired the sobriquet "Mother of the World." The text explores the extent to which islands inspired these radical thinkers to perform innovative work. Each used islands differently, but similar phenomena affected their choice of place and the outcome of their projects. Their examples illuminate the relationship of modernism to alienation and insularity.
Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.
Despite sustained scholarly interest in the politics of modernism, astonishingly little attention has been paid to its relationship to Conservatism. Yet modernist writing was imbricated with Tory rhetoric and ideology from when it emerged in the Edwardian era. By investigating the many intersections between Anglophone modernism and Tory politics, Conservative Modernists offers new ways to read major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Ford Madox Ford. It also highlights the contribution to modernism of lesser-known writers, including Edward Storer, J. M. Kennedy, and A. M. Ludovici. These are the figures to whom it most frequently returns, but, cutting through disciplinary delineations, the book simultaneously reveals the inputs to modernism of a broad range of political writers, philosophers, art historians, and crowd psychologists: from Pascal, Burke, and Disraeli, to Nietzsche, Le Bon, Wallas, Worringer, Ribot, Bergson, and Scheler.
Stephen Eric Bronner reads the artistic and intellectual achievements of the modernist project's leading figures against larger social, political, and cultural trends and follows the rise of a flawed yet salient effort at liberation and its clash with modernity. Exploring both the political responsibility of the artist and the manipulation of authorial intention, Bronner reconfigures the modernist movement for contemporary progressive purposes and offers insight into the problems still complicating cultural politics. He ultimately reasserts the political dimension of developments often understood in purely aesthetic terms and confronts the self-indulgence and political irresponsibility of certain so-called modernists today.
Archipelagic Modernism examines the anglophone literatures of the archipelago from 1890 to 1970 for what they tell us about changing identities, geographies, and ecologies.
This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.
Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future. Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" into a state of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare the Gorgon. Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative contribution to what it means to be modern.
Considering texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Agee, and William Carlos Williams, alongside film, painting, music, and popular culture, Mark Goble explores the development of American modernism as it was shaped by its response to technology and an attempt to change how literature itself could communicate. Goble's original readings reinterpret the aesthetics of modernism in the early twentieth century, when new modes of communication made the experience of technology an occasion for profound experimentation and reflection. He follows the assimilation of such "old" media technologies as the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph and their role in inspiring fantasies of connection, which informed a commitment to the materiality of artistic mediums. Describing how relationships made possible by technology became more powerfully experienced with technology, Goble explores a modernist fetish for media that shows no signs of abating. The "mediated life" puts technology into communication with a series of shifts in how Americans conceive the mechanics and meanings of their connections to one another, and therefore to the world and to their own modernity.
Taiwan is a peculiar place resulting in a peculiar cinema, with Hou Hsiao-hsien being its most remarkable product. Hou’s signature long and static shots almost invite critics to give auteurist readings of his films, often privileging the analysis of cinematic techniques at the expense of the context from which Hou emerges. In this pioneering study, James Udden argues instead that the Taiwanese experience is the key to understanding Hou’s art. The convoluted history of Taiwan in the last century has often rendered fixed social and political categories irrelevant. Changing circumstances have forced the people in Taiwan to be hyperaware of how imaginary identity—above all national identity—is. Hou translates this larger state of affairs in such masterpieces as City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, and Flowers of Shanghai, which capture and perhaps even embody the elusive, slippery contours of the collective experience of the islanders. Making extensive uses of Chinese sources from Taiwan, the author shows how important the local matters for this globally recognized director. In this new edition of No Man an Island, James Udden charts a new chapter in the evolving art of Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose latest film, The Assassin, earned him the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Hou breaks new ground in turning the classic wuxia genre into a vehicle to express his unique insight into the working of history. The unconventional approach to conventions is quintessential Hou Hsiao-hsien. “An excellent and groundbreaking volume. This book’s very precise analyses of the films as well as their context make it the primary source for any scholar working on Hou in English.” —Chris Berry, King’s College London “In this first book-length study on Hou Hsiao-hsien James Udden illuminates the most intriguing yet mystifying filmmaker in world cinema. No Man an Island is without doubt a major contribution to the fields of Chinese-language cinema and film studies.” —Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were faced with the challenges and uncertainties of a new era. The comfortable Victorian values of continuity, progress, and order clashed with the unsettling modern notions of constant change, relative truth, and chaos. Attempting to embrace the intellectual challenges of modernism, American thinkers of the day were yet reluctant to welcome the wholesale rejection of the past and destruction of traditional values. In Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900, George Cotkin surveys the intellectual life of this crucial transitional period. His story begins with the Darwinian controversies, since the mainstream of American culture was just beginning to come to grips with the implications of the Origins of Species, published in 1859. Cotkin demonstrates the effects of this shift in thinking on philosophy, anthropology, and the newly developing field of psychology. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of these fields, he explains clearly and concisely the essential tenets of such major thinkers and writers as William James, Franz Boas, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry Adams, and Kate Chopin. Throughout this fascinating, readable history of the American fin de si cle run the contrasting themes of continuity and change, faith and rationalism, despair over the meaninglessness of life and, ultimately, a guarded optimism about the future.