The European Avant-Garde

This book offers an informative and accessible cultural history of the European avant-garde in its early twentieth-century heyday. It provides comparative coverage of cultural experimentation across the major European languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Spanish and Italian.

Andrew Webber presents striking examples to illustrate a time of unprecedented experiment and energetic performance in all aspects of culture. Readings of some of the most important and characteristic avant-garde texts, pictures and films are set against some of the key developments of the period: advances in technology and psychology; the rise of radical politics; the cultural ferment of the modern metropolis; and the upheaval in issues of gender and sexuality. The author’s mediation between a variety of cultural forms, combining political and psychoanalytical modes of understanding, evokes the richness of the age in a manner that students will find both illuminating and provocative.

This volume will be an excellent textbook for courses on the avant-garde in departments of comparative cultural studies, literature and film studies.

Andrew J. Webber is University Senior Lecturer in German and Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge.

List of Plates.

Preface.

1. Introduction: The Historical Avant-garde and Cultural History.

2. Manifestations: The Public Sphere.

3. Writing the City: Urban Technology and Poetic Technique.

4. Modes of Performance: Film-Theatre.

5. Case Histories: Narratives of the Avant-garde.

Conclusion: Allegories of the Avant-garde.

Epilogue: After the Avant-garde?.

Notes.

Index.