The Cambridge History of Modernism

Description

This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.

Vincent Sherry is Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Washington University, St Louis. A prominent scholar of modernism, he is the author of a number of major books in this field, including The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003), James Joyce's Ulysses (1995, 2005) and Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993). He has also written The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (1987) and edited the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (2005).

'The Cambridge History of Modernism is ambitious, thorough, and will be invaluable for researchers and educators ... The volume covers a huge amount of ground, probing modernist sensibilities with attention to time, space, aesthetics, genre, gender, race, technology, and politics in 43 wide-ranging essays. The Cambridge History of Modernism is destined to become a landmark piece of modernist scholarship ... Thankfully, Sherry's editorship has produced a text that earns the status it is destined to achieve. Much care and attention has gone into making this a clear and coherent volume that explains and justifies its choices, rather than taking anything about modernism as a given.' Gemma Moss, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies '... Sherry's The Cambridge History of Modernism is indispensable and belongs in all serious reference collections.' The Year's Work in English Studies