Modernism in the Green traces a trans-Atlantic modernist fascination with the creation, use, and representation of the modern green. From the verdant public commons in the heart of cities to the lookout points on mountains in national parks, planned green spaces serve as felicitous stages for the performance of modernism. In its focus on designed and public green zones,Modernism in the Green offers a new perspective on modernism’s overlapping investments in the arts, politics, urbanism, race, class, gender, and the nature-culture divide. This collection of essays is the first to explore the prominent and diverse ways greens materialize in modern literature and culture, along with the manner in which modernists represented them. This volume presents the idea of "the green" as a point of exploration, as our contributors analyze social-organic spaces ranging from public parks to roadways and refuse piles. Like the term "green," one that evokes both more-than-human natural zones and crafted public meeting places, these chapters uncover the social and spatial intersection of nature and culture in the very architecture of parks, gardens, buildings, highways, and dumps. This book argues that such greens facilitate modernists’ exploration of how nature can manifest in an era of increasing urbanization and mechanization and what identities and communities the green now enables or prevents.

Vernacular Modernism advocates a rethinking of the importance of the vernacular as part of the modernist discourse of place, from art to literature, from architectural to social practice.

Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--Oxford University, 2000.

A Poiret dress, a Catholic shrine in France, Thomas Wallis's Hoover Factory building, an Edna Manley sculpture, the poetry of Bei Dao, the internal combustion engine- what makes such artifacts modernist? Disciplining Modernism explores the different ways disciplines conceive modernism and modernity, undisciplining modernist studies in the process.

This innovative text examines the development of modernist writing in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna.

In his short life, William Morris (1834-96) combined the roles of poet, author, painter, designer, translator, lecturer, political activist, journalist, weaver, bookmaker, and businessman. This volume draws together influential voices from different disciplines who have participated in the recent critical, political, and curatorial revival of his work, with essays exploring the contemporary resonance of his exceptional legacy. As a critic of capitalism, his thinking has thrived in these years of financial crisis; as a theorist of work and craftsmanship, his legacy interacts with a more recent ethics of making that questions the values of 'off-shored' production; and as a protector of landscape and buildings Morris's concern with what is precious strikes a chord in our age of environmental crisis. At the same time, a careful and scholarly approach observes the particularity of Morris's context, in a way that confounds the 'false friends' of hasty historical reception and reveals unexpected connections.

With fascism on the march in Europe and a second World War looming, a group of Britain's leading intellectuals – including T.S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim, John Middleton Murry, J. H. Oldham and Michael Polanyi – gathered together to explore ways of revitalising a culture that seemed to have lost its way. The group called themselves 'the Moot'. Drawing on previously unpublished archival documents, this is the first in-depth study of the group's work, writings and ideas in the decade of its existence from 1938-1947. Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism explores the ways in which an important and influential strand of Modernist thought in the interwar years turned back to Christian ideas to offer a blueprint for the revitalisation of European culture. In this way the book challenges conceptions of Modernism as a secular movement and sheds new light on the culture of the late Modernist period.

Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization.

The purpose of this book is to explore the ways in which the London Underground/ Tube was "mapped" by a number of writers from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf. From late Victorian London to the end of the World War II, "underground writing" created an imaginative world beneath the streets ofLondon. The real subterranean railway was therefore re-enacted in number of ways in writing, including as Dantean Underworld or hell, as gateway to a utopian future, as psychological looking- glass or as place of safety and security. The book is a chronological study from the opening of the first underground in the 1860s to its role in WW2. Each chapter explores perspectives on the underground in a number of writers, starting with George Gissing in the 1880s, moving through the work of H. G. Wells and into the writing of the1920s and 1930s including Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. It concludes with its portrayal in the fiction, poetry and art (including Henry Moore) of WW2. The approach takes a broadly cultural studies perspective, crossing the boundaries of transport history, literature and London/urban studies. It draws mainly on fiction but also uses poetry, art, journals, postcards and posters to illustrate. It links the actual underground trains, tracks andstations to the metaphorical world of "underground writing" and places the writing in a social/political context.