Sarah Posman

Stein's modernist fascination with life connects her writing to late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers.

Gertrude Stein, Modernism and Life

Vital Stein

Laura Luise Schultz

Although often hailed as a 'quintessentially American' writer, the modernist poet, novelist and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) spent most of her life in France. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Gertrude Stein in Europe is the first sustained exploration of the European artistic and intellectual networks in which Stein's work was first developed and circulated. Along the way, the book investigates the European contexts of Stein's writing, how her own work intersected with European thought, including phenomenology and the vitalist work of Henri Bergson, and ultimately how it was received by scholars and artists across the continent. Gertrude Stein in Europe opens up new perspectives on Stein as a writer and on the centrality of artistic and intellectual networks to European modernism.

Reconfigurations Across Media, Disciplines, and Traditions

Gertrude Stein in Europe

Jeroen Dera

Killa van der Starre

nederlandse en Vlaamse poëzie in de 21e eeuw

Dichters van het nieuwe millennium / druk 1

Anne Reverseau

Benedikt Hjartarson

Sascha Bru

David Ayers

It has often been argued that the arrival of the early-20th-century avant-gardes and modernisms coincided with an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing. The European historical avant-gardes and modernisms excelled in their attempts to establish the specificity of media and art forms as well as in experimenting with the hybridity of the materials of their multiple disciplines. This third volume of the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies sheds light on the full range and import of this aspect in avant-garde and modernist aesthetics across all art forms and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The book’s contributions, written by experts from some 20 countries, seek to answer the following questions: What sort of objects and material, works and media help us to properly grasp the avant-garde and modernist “aesthetics of matter”? How were affects, emotions and sensory and bodily experiences transferred and transformed in the experiment with matter? How were “immaterial” things such as concepts of time changed in this aesthetic moment? What “material meanings” were disseminated in the cultural transfer and translation of objects? How did subsequent avant-gardes deal with the “aesthetics of matter” in their response to historical predecessors?

Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange

The Aesthetics of Matter

Marysa Demoor

Cedric Van Dijck

The First World War changed the dynamics of the European intellectual landscape in terms of international collaboration, the development of disciplines, and new institutional visions. The conflict not only destroyed much of Europe's material cultural heritage, it also damaged the 19th-century humanist conception of the function of thought, and it problematised the position of the thinker in society. What is the intellectual's task in a time of destruction and death? This book spotlights the ways in which the war redrew the map of knowledge production and changed traditional paradigms, fundamentally altering the approach to intellectual work. Thinking became more democratic and specialised, with a range of voices tackling specific problems created by the war, but now more conspicuously related to particular causes. The focus on the viewpoints of the 1914-1918 intellectual cadre throws into perspective the ways in which the war changed the contents, methods, and organisation of intellectual work. Part One looks at the war as an object of study; Part Two explores the methodological challenges the war entailed; and Part Three sheds light on the ways in which the conflict and its aftermath redrew the map of collaborative intellectual networks. The case studies come from different disciplines and cover a range of contexts, from German engineering to British wartime periodicals. Revisiting the early 20th-century intellectual situation not only enriches our understanding of the dynamics of the Great War, it also assists in repositioning the role of the intellectual in the 21st century. [Subject: World War I, History, Intellectual History]

How the Conflict Impacted on Ideas, Methods and Fields of Enquiry

The Intellectual Response to the First World War

Sarah Posman

Books

Your next favorite book is out there