To coincide with the Modernist Studies Association annual conference in Chicago this November, we’ve curated a reading list featuring new and bestselling books that explore various themes from within Modernist Studies. From promethean horror to surrealist art, this reading list has something for all readers.
Although MUP won’t be attending this year, delegates can still browse our Modernist Studies books here and purchase selected titles with a special 30% conference discount, using code EVENT30 at checkout. Not attending either? You can still get 30% off titles too!
Surrealism and film after 1945
Surrealism and Film after 1945 is the first collection devoted to the vibrant culture of transnational surrealist cinema since the Second World War. Eleven chapters by leading and emerging scholars of surrealism and film studies establish the parameters of this history and situate surrealism as a major force in postwar cinema.
An original and provocative study. Theoretically lucid and engaging, it will be an essential text for any student of film.
Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde
This collection offers the first in-depth study of the radio medium's significance as a site of artistic experimentation for the literary neo-avant-garde in the postwar era. It addresses institutional and contextual aspects of audio drama, as well as intermedial and material issues alongside ideological and political topics.
This ground-breaking study analyses Beckett's television plays in relation to the history and theory of television. It argues that they are in dialogue with innovative television traditions connected to Modernism in television, film, radio, theatre, literature and the visual arts.
This book
This book presents a cultural history of Promethean Horror in the modern age, tracing the rise of a sub-genre of gothic fiction in the twentieth-century and examining post-modern revisions of Modernist "Promethean" tropes in an eclectic range of gothic, fantasy and SF writing.
Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel offers readers new to Virginia Woolf a lively introduction to this timeless classic, while providing established lovers with a wealth of information about the novel's writing, publication and reception.
This fascinating book tells the story of the fearless and innovative publishers who combined pornography and avant-garde literature to make a lasting mark on twentieth-century culture.
Nietzsche and Irish Modernism deftly traces the circulation of the German philosopher's ideas in Irish culture during the early years of the twentieth century. In doing so, the book demonstrates how Nietzsche's thought inspired new, disruptive modes of writing, which spoke to local historical circumstances and the predicaments of modernity at large
1913: The year of French modernism
This book takes its cue from the annus miabilis for French culture to outline French modernism and to situate it on the map of global modernism. Essays on specific works in various media present the first narrative of French modernism as a critical category and establish its position in the thriving field of modernist studies.
Fragmenting modernism' is about Ford Madox Ford, a hero of the modernist literary revolution.
Featuring essays by leading scholars of surrealism, this book offers the first sustained critical inquiry into the multifaceted writing of women associated with surrealism, and highlights howthis oeuvre intersects with and contributes to contemporary debates on gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment.
Modernism and the making of the Soviet New Man
Modernism and the Making of the New Man is a history or Soviet architecture that is unique in that, instead of styles or great architects, it focuses on the design of communist subjectivity - the notion of the "new man".
Ideal homes investigates the tastes and aspirations of the suburban communities that emerged in Britain after the First World War. It explores how new class and gender identities were forged through the architecture and decoration of the home. This edition includes a chapter on researching the history of your own house.
EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism
This book critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites give rise to peculiarly parallel polyphonic fictional forms. It redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory.
British literature and archaeology, 1880-1930
Reveals how British writers and artists engaged with archaeological discourse as a crucial mode of conceptualising modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining multiple literary genres and visual media from 1880-1930, the book traces archaeological discourse in discussions about sexuality, aesthetics, authenticity, and historiography.
This book productively contests the supposedly exclusive feminine aspect of the style moderne (Art Deco). Through a sustained focus on the figure of the dandy, the books claims an essential role and place of the male body and masculinity in the history of Art Deco.
In this memoir, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, son of the renowned Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, draws on remembered conversations and events to demythologise his mother and declare her not an icon or a goddess but, first and foremost, an artist.
Surrealist sabotage and the war on work
Surrealist sabotage and the war on work is an art historical study devoted to international surrealism's critique of wage labour between 1920 and 1980. Topics such as automatism, artworks across media, radical publications and social interventions are examined in relation to the movement's ongoing demand for non-alienated work.
The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the leading role Germanophone women artists have played in deploying surrealism to respond to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War.
The medium of Leonora Carrington
A critical survey of Leonora Carrington's legacies in contemporary creative practice. The medium of Leonora Carrington explores why creative people, especially women, are preoccupied with making work in her legacy today.
This study charts how exhibitions were used for propaganda and political intervention during the two decades from 1933: giving urgent warnings against the rise of fascism, providing practical information about how to live frugally and signalling international political alignments, beliefs and affiliations.
This beautiful and deeply personal book blends memoir and biography with literary criticism to offer a new perspective on the legendary American writer James Baldwin.
John Ashbery and American Poetry
starting point. David Herd sets out to provide readers with a new critical language through which they can appreciate the beauty and complexity of Ashbery's writing.
Presenting the poet in all his...
This year the James Baldwin Review celebrates its tenth issue.
Find out more about the journal here.
