Focusing on literature and visual art in the years 1910-1935, Modernist Fraud begins with the omnipresent accusations that modernism was not art at all, but rather an effort to pass off patently absurd works as great art. These assertions, common in the time's journalism, are used to understand the aesthetic and context which spawned them, and to look at what followed in their wake. Fraud discourse ventured into the aesthetic theory of the time, to ideas of artistic sincerity, formalism, and the intentional fallacy. In doing so, it profoundly shaped the modern canon and its justifying principles. Modernist Fraud explores a wide range of materials. It draws on reviews and newspaper accounts of art scandals, such as the 1913 Armory Show, the 1910 and 1912 Postimpressionist shows, and Tender Buttons; to daily syndicated columns; to parodies and doggerel; to actual hoaxes, such as Spectra and Disumbrationism; to the literary criticism of Edith Sitwell; to the trial of Brancusi's Bird in Space; and to the contents of the magazine Blind Man, including a defense of Duchamp's Fountain, a poem by Bill Brown, and the works of, and an interview with, the bafflingly unstable painter Louis Eilshemius. In turning to these materials, the book reevaluates how modernism interacted with the public and describes how a new aesthetic begins: not as a triumphant explosion that initiates irrevocable changes, but as an uncertain muddling and struggle with ideology.

Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It arguesthat parody is central to the whole modernist project. As a literary technique, parody provided the means for modernists of many stripes to learn their craft, sharpen their historical sense, definethemselves as post-Victorians, and respond to sources of inspiration while composing.

In The Arts of Deception, James Cook explores the distinctly modern mode of trickery designed to puzzle the eye and challenge the brain. Upsetting the normally strict boundaries of value, race, class, and truth, the spectacles offer a revealing look at the tastes, concerns, and prejudices of America's very first mass audiences.

This study covers Iain Sinclair's major works, but also seeks to trace the connections between the writings and his earlier books of poetry.

The tradional inhabitants of London's Docklands--the crafty Cockney miscreants of yore--have lately been shoved aside by an onslaught of sleek condos and chic cafes. But luckily, our narrator--along with a band of fellow eccentrics--has been hired to film a documentary about old-time life along the Thames.

Addressing the division between art and class (aesthetics and politics), and arguing that cultural impoverishment has been the result of this split, Watson puts forward theories that revive the interconnection and provide a startling reappraisal of Marx, Trotsky, Voloshinov, Freud and Philip K. Dick. This book ranges freely over the cultural options of modern life -- rock 'n' roll, avant garde music, poetry, science fiction, jazz, installation art -- while keeping its theoretical critique short, sharp and shocking.

The Thames runs through Downriver like an open wound, draining the pain and filth of London and its mercurial inhabitants. Commissioned to document the shifting embankments of failed industry and rampant property speculation, a film crew of magpie scavengers, high-rent low life, broken criminals and reborn lunatics pick over the river's detritus. They examine the wound, hoping to expose the cause of the city's affliction . . .