This book establishes the role of French writer Charles Baudelaire in the formation of paradigms of modernity in Italian poetry between 1857, the year of publication of Baudelaire’s highly influential collection Les Fleurs du Mal, and 1912, when the first anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi, was published in Milan. It focuses primarily on Baudelaire’s influence on the poetry of the Scapigliatura, a long-underrated movement which in the 1860s introduced a thematic and formal modernity into Italian literature, paving the way for Futurism and the twentieth-century avant-garde. This monograph also investigates Baudelaire’s and the Scapigliatura’s interrelated impacts on early Futurist poetry, demonstrating that Futurist poets turned to the works of Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura for inspiration on themes that were considered as distinctly unpoetic – and therefore modern – such as medical-anatomical examination, technological transformation, and abnormal sensuality.

This book establishes the role of French writer Charles Baudelaire in the formation of paradigms of modernity in Italian poetry between 1857, the year of publication of Baudelaire's highly influential collection Les Fleurs du Mal, and 1912, when the first anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi, was published in Milan. It focuses primarily on Baudelaire's influence on the poetry of the Scapigliatura, a long-underrated movement which in the 1860s introduced a thematic and formal modernity into Italian literature, paving the way for Futurism and the twentieth-century avant-garde. This monograph also investigates Baudelaire's and the Scapigliatura's interrelated impacts on early Futurist poetry, demonstrating that Futurist poets turned to the works of Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura for inspiration on themes that were considered as distinctly unpoetic - and therefore modern - such as medical-anatomical examination, technological transformation, and abnormal sensuality. Alessandro Cabiati is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and Brown University, USA, where he investigates the ways in which nineteenth-century literary fairy tales contributed to the cultural discourse on psychological deviance and abnormality, while also influencing medical debate. In recent years, he has undertaken research at King's College London and at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh. .

One of the defining features of modernism lies in its far-reaching rethinking of the relation between the human and the non-human. In the present volume, this crucial aspect of modernism’s legacy is investigated from an authentically transnational perspective, taking an innovative stance on a diverse range of authors – from posthumanist classics such as Beckett and Woolf to Valentine de Saint-Point, Radoje Domanovic and Aldo Palazzeschi among others. On the one hand, this collection sheds new light on the modernist contribution to posthumanism, providing a valuable reference point for future studies on the topic. On the other, it offers a new take on the transnational dimension of modernism, highlighting unexplored convergences between modernist authors from several different national contexts.

Italian Modernism was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of Decadentismo and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition. Focussing on the confrontation between these concepts and the broader notion of international modernism, the essays in this important collection seek to understand this complex phase of literary and artistic practices as a response to the epistemes of philosophical and scientific modernity at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth. Intellectually provocative, this collection is the first attempt in the field of Italian Studies at a comprehensive account of Italian literary modernism. Each contributor documents how previous critical categories, employed to account for the literary, artistic, and cultural experiences of the period, have provided only partial and inadequate descriptions, preventing a fuller understanding of the complexities and the interrelations among the cultural phenomena of the time.

The first part of Volume 14 of the Yearbook presents ten essays concerned with Futurism in Italy, Russia, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Germany, and two focusing on dance and typography. Among other things, this publication provides analysis of the futurist manifestos from late 1910 and 1911 and Velimir Khlebnikov’s futurist essays, as well as the networks of Futurism in Odessa. In the second part, a section on Caricatures and Satires of Futurism in the Contemporary Press examines five humorous images from five countries, in which the movement and its leader were lampooned. This section is followed by nine reviews of recent exhibitions, conferences and publications, and an annual bibliography with details of 128 new books on Futurism. Futurism from international, comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives Transcultural view of international avant-gardes

In The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power, Ronald E. Day provides a historically informed critical analysis of the concept and politics of information. Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, his critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history. After laying the groundwork and justifying his method of close reading for this study, Day examines the texts of two pre–World War II documentalists, Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. Through the work of Otlet and Briet, Day shows how documentation and information were associated with concepts of cultural progress. Day also discusses the social expansion of the conduit metaphor in the works of Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener. He then shows how the work of contemporary French multimedia theorist Pierre Lévy refracts the earlier philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through the prism of the capitalist understanding of the “virtual society.” Turning back to the pre–World War II period, Day examines two critics of the information society: Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. He explains Heidegger’s philosophical critique of the information culture’s model of language and truth as well as Benjamin’s aesthetic and historical critique of mass information and communication. Day concludes by contemplating the relation of critical theory and information, particularly in regard to the information culture’s transformation of history, historiography, and historicity into positive categories of assumed and represented knowledge.

In recent decades the previously assumed dominance within the international art world of western(ized) conceptions of aesthetic modernity has been challenged by a critically becalming diversification of cultural outlooks widely referred to as 'contemporaneity'. Contributing to that diversification are assertions within mainland China of essential differences between Chinese and western art. In response to the critical impasse posed by contemporaneity, Paul Gladston charts a historical relay of mutually formative interactions between the artworlds of China and the West as part of a new transcultural theory of artistic criticality. Informed by deconstructivism as well as syncretic Confucianism, Gladston extends this theory to a reading of the work of the artist Zhang Peili and his involvement with the Hangzhou-based art group, the Pond Association (Chi she). Revealed is a critical aesthetic productively resistant to any single interpretative viewpoint, including those of Chinese exceptionalism and the supposed immanence of deconstructivist uncertainty. Addressing art in and from the People's Republic of China as a significant aspect of post-West contemporaneity, Gladston provides a new critical understanding of what it means to be 'contemporary' and the profound changes taking place in the art world today.

"Encounters with modern life: a painter's impressions of modernity - Delacroix, citizen of the 19th century, Michele Hannoosh. Second Empire impressions: curiosite, John House-- on his knees to the past? Gautier, Ingres and forms of modern art, James Kearns-- "Le peintre de la vie moderne" and "La peinture de la vie ancienne", Paul Smith. Innovating forms: matter for reflexion - 19th-century French art critics' quest for modernity in sculpture, David Scott-- visual display in the realist novel - "l'aventure du style"-- dirt and desire - troubled waters in realist practice, Alan Krell. Modernity and identity: the dancer as woman - Loie Fuller and Stephanie Mallarme, Dee Reynolds-- the "atelier" novel - painters as fiction, Joy Newton-- to move the eye - impressionism, symbolism and well-being, circa 1891, Richard Schiff." (résumééditeur)

Walter Benjamin's most famous and influential essay remains The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art is the first book to provide a broad and dedicated analysis of this canonical work and its effect upon core contemporary concerns in the visual arts, aesthetics and the history of philosophy. The book is structured around three distinct areas: the extension of Benjamin's work; the question of historical connection; the importance of the essay in the development of criticism of both the visual arts and literature. Contributors to the volume include major Benjamin commentators, whose work has very much defined the reception of the essay, and leading philosophers, historians and aesthetician, whose approaches open up new areas of interest and relevance.

Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse stages an encounter between the fields of ‘Modernism and Christianity’ and ‘Apocalypse Studies’. The modernist impulse to ‘make it new’, to transform and reform culture, is an incipiently apocalyptic one, poised between imaginative representations of an Old Era or civilization and the experimental promise of the New. Christianity figures in formative tension with the ‘new’, but its apocalyptic paradigms continued to impact modernist visions of cultural revitalization. In three sections tracing a rough chronology from the late nineteenth century fin de siècle, via interwar conflicts and the rise of ‘political religions’, to post-1945 anxieties such as the Bomb, this thematic is explored in nineteen far-ranging scholarly contributions, outlining a distinctive and fresh interdisciplinary field of study.