Focusing on the complex relationship between John Ruskin and Anglo-American modernism, this volume features contributions from international scholars examining his significant yet often overlooked influence. It highlights how Ruskin's extensive writings harbor an emerging modernism that critiques the shortcomings of contemporary society, foreshadowing key themes in the works of the following century. This exploration sheds light on Ruskin's role in shaping modern thought and his enduring legacy in the context of modernism.
Why was the Bard of Avon so frequently on the agenda of avant-garde writers in Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Germany and Ireland? This volume explores the rich and diverse landscape of Shakespearean encounters in the tormented aesthetics of pre- and post-World War I Europe. However manipulated, deformed or transfigured, the Renaissance dramatist was revived in infinite guises: verbal, philosophical, visual and linguistic. Was he an icon to be demolished ruthlessly as the expression of a stale past or, on the contrary, did his works offer the foundation for new and provocative artistic explorations? Was he an enemy, a foil, a mirror? As they cross the borders of European countries and languages, the essays of this book interrogate Shakespeare’s living presence and chart the multiple facets of his vibrant and chameleonic afterlives as no single volume has done before. The exploration of territories situated beyond Anglophone boundaries partly displaces the Bard from his given niche in English culture and retrieves lost or marginalized Shakespearean voices. The annotated bibliographies which complete the volume greatly extend the territory of scholarship and offer a precious map of orientation in the maze of critical works.
The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism
The intersection between space and narrative has often aroused critical interest, especially in the cross-fertilization of language and imagination. In Modernist avant-garde culture this activity was particularly intense and turbulent. Not only did science and technology undergo sudden and rapid developments in the early twentieth century, but the powerful geopolitical movements of the time effectively redrew the maps of the Western world. The essays in this collection address the ways in which three generations of British and American artists responded to these ontological changes, as they were both literally and metaphorically ‘thrown’ on the roads. Drawing upon a new geographical awareness in the work of critics such as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Arjun Appadurai, Edward Soja and Doreen Massey, this book invites the reader to explore the disrupted territories of Modernism. It offers readings of places as diverse as William Faulkner’s Mississippi, Virginia Woolf’s Thames, Ford Madox Ford’s Romney Marsh, W. H. Auden’s islands, Christopher Isherwood’s alternative Berlin and Rubén Martínez’s transfrontera . The writers in the volume explore a geography of edges, borders and trails and investigate the aesthetic modes fashioned by nomadic practices.
