Inexorable Yankeehood

Inexorable Yankeehood

Author: Robin P. Hoople

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0838757375

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This book analyzes the reciprocating collision between Henry James and American journalism during his 1904-1905 tour. It charts James' progress as he gathers the impressions upon which he will base his 'theory of America.' If James arrives as a 'restored absentee' seeking a renewed relationship with his homeland, the press greets his return with reverence for his status combined with disdain for his prose.


Book Synopsis Inexorable Yankeehood by : Robin P. Hoople

Download or read book Inexorable Yankeehood written by Robin P. Hoople and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the reciprocating collision between Henry James and American journalism during his 1904-1905 tour. It charts James' progress as he gathers the impressions upon which he will base his 'theory of America.' If James arrives as a 'restored absentee' seeking a renewed relationship with his homeland, the press greets his return with reverence for his status combined with disdain for his prose.


The Life of Henry James

The Life of Henry James

Author: Peter Collister

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2023-03-27

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 1119483093

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Discover anew the life and influence of Henry James, part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Critical Biographies series. In The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, Peter Collister, an established critic and authority on Henry James, offers an original and fully documented account of one of America’s finest writers, who was both a creative practitioner and theorist of the novel. In this volume, James’s life in all its personal and cultural richness is examined alongside a detailed scrutiny of his fiction, essays, biographies, autobiographies, travel writing, plays and reviews. James was a dedicated and brilliant letter-writer and his biographer make judicious use of this material, some of it previously unpublished, evoking in the novelist’s own words the society within which he moved and worked. His gift for friendship, often resulting in close relationships with both men and women, are sensitively explored. Near the beginning of his long and highly productive life, James left America to immerse himself in European culture and history – a necessity, he felt, for the developing artist. In an ironic symmetry he witnessed in his youth the effects of the American Civil War and in his last days, finally becoming a British citizen, despaired at the unfolding tragedy of the Great War in Europe. Sustained, nevertheless, by his own creative energy, he never ceased to believe in the capacity of the arts to enhance and give significance to life. Provides well-informed accounts of Henry James’s youth in New York City, his unconventional education, his extensive travel in Europe, his eventual assimilation into British society, his development as a writer and his personal relationships as a single man. Features discussions of James’s major works in a variety of genres from an assured theoretical and historical perspective. Assesses James’s developing quest for dramatic form in his fiction – the ‘scenic art’ – as well as his critical writing which was to have a lasting influence on the literature and aesthetic values of the twentieth century. Discusses his achieved aspiration to be ‘just literary’, to become what he called that ‘queer monster’, an artist. Charts James’s lifelong interest in art and theatre. An incisive discussion of the life of an author of major stature, The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography offers a refreshingly lucid and human account of a novelist and his often challenging, but rewarding, writing. Peter Collister, a former college Assistant Principal, has published many essays in Europe and America on a range of nineteenth-century British and French authors. He is the author of Writing the Self: Henry James and America and later edited for the university presses of Cambridge and Virginia the award-winning volumes: The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama, James's autobiographical writings, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, as well as The American Scene.


Book Synopsis The Life of Henry James by : Peter Collister

Download or read book The Life of Henry James written by Peter Collister and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-03-27 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover anew the life and influence of Henry James, part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Critical Biographies series. In The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, Peter Collister, an established critic and authority on Henry James, offers an original and fully documented account of one of America’s finest writers, who was both a creative practitioner and theorist of the novel. In this volume, James’s life in all its personal and cultural richness is examined alongside a detailed scrutiny of his fiction, essays, biographies, autobiographies, travel writing, plays and reviews. James was a dedicated and brilliant letter-writer and his biographer make judicious use of this material, some of it previously unpublished, evoking in the novelist’s own words the society within which he moved and worked. His gift for friendship, often resulting in close relationships with both men and women, are sensitively explored. Near the beginning of his long and highly productive life, James left America to immerse himself in European culture and history – a necessity, he felt, for the developing artist. In an ironic symmetry he witnessed in his youth the effects of the American Civil War and in his last days, finally becoming a British citizen, despaired at the unfolding tragedy of the Great War in Europe. Sustained, nevertheless, by his own creative energy, he never ceased to believe in the capacity of the arts to enhance and give significance to life. Provides well-informed accounts of Henry James’s youth in New York City, his unconventional education, his extensive travel in Europe, his eventual assimilation into British society, his development as a writer and his personal relationships as a single man. Features discussions of James’s major works in a variety of genres from an assured theoretical and historical perspective. Assesses James’s developing quest for dramatic form in his fiction – the ‘scenic art’ – as well as his critical writing which was to have a lasting influence on the literature and aesthetic values of the twentieth century. Discusses his achieved aspiration to be ‘just literary’, to become what he called that ‘queer monster’, an artist. Charts James’s lifelong interest in art and theatre. An incisive discussion of the life of an author of major stature, The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography offers a refreshingly lucid and human account of a novelist and his often challenging, but rewarding, writing. Peter Collister, a former college Assistant Principal, has published many essays in Europe and America on a range of nineteenth-century British and French authors. He is the author of Writing the Self: Henry James and America and later edited for the university presses of Cambridge and Virginia the award-winning volumes: The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama, James's autobiographical writings, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, as well as The American Scene.


Venice Desired

Venice Desired

Author: Tony Tanner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780674933125

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If there is one city that might be said to embody both reason and desire, it would surely be Venice: a thousand-year triumph of rational legislation, aesthetic and sensual self-expression, and self-creation--powerful, lovely, serene. Unique in so many ways, Venice is also unique in its relation to writing. London has Dickens, Paris has Balzac, Saint Petersburg has Dostoevsky, Dublin has Joyce, but there is simply no comparable writer for, or out of, Venice. Venice effectively disappeared from history altogether in 1797 after its defeat by Napoleon. From then on, it seemed to exist as a curiously marooned spectacle. Literally marooned--the city mysteriously growing out of the sea, the beautiful stone impossibly floating on water--but temporally marooned as well, stagnating outside history. Yet as spectacle, as the beautiful city par excellence, the city of art, the city as art and as spectacular example, as the greatest and richest republic in the history of the world, now declined and fallen, Venice became an important site for the European imagination. Watery, dark, silent, a place of sensuality and secrecy; of masks and masquerading; of an always possibly treacherous beauty; of Desdemona and Iago, Shylock, Volpone; of conspiracy and courtesans in Otway; an obvious setting for many Gothic novels--Venice is not written from the inside but variously appropriated from without. Venice--the place, the name, the dream--seems to lend itself to a whole variety of appreciations, recuperations, and and hallucinations. In decay and decline, yet saturated with secret sexuality--suggesting a heady compound of death and desire--Venice becomes for many writers what is was for Byron: both "the greenest island of my imagination" and a "sea-sodom." It also, as this book tries to show, plays a crucial role in the development of modern writing. Tanner skillfully lays before us the many ways in which this dreamlike city has been summoned up, depicted, dramatized--then rediscovered or transfigured in selected writings through the years.


Book Synopsis Venice Desired by : Tony Tanner

Download or read book Venice Desired written by Tony Tanner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If there is one city that might be said to embody both reason and desire, it would surely be Venice: a thousand-year triumph of rational legislation, aesthetic and sensual self-expression, and self-creation--powerful, lovely, serene. Unique in so many ways, Venice is also unique in its relation to writing. London has Dickens, Paris has Balzac, Saint Petersburg has Dostoevsky, Dublin has Joyce, but there is simply no comparable writer for, or out of, Venice. Venice effectively disappeared from history altogether in 1797 after its defeat by Napoleon. From then on, it seemed to exist as a curiously marooned spectacle. Literally marooned--the city mysteriously growing out of the sea, the beautiful stone impossibly floating on water--but temporally marooned as well, stagnating outside history. Yet as spectacle, as the beautiful city par excellence, the city of art, the city as art and as spectacular example, as the greatest and richest republic in the history of the world, now declined and fallen, Venice became an important site for the European imagination. Watery, dark, silent, a place of sensuality and secrecy; of masks and masquerading; of an always possibly treacherous beauty; of Desdemona and Iago, Shylock, Volpone; of conspiracy and courtesans in Otway; an obvious setting for many Gothic novels--Venice is not written from the inside but variously appropriated from without. Venice--the place, the name, the dream--seems to lend itself to a whole variety of appreciations, recuperations, and and hallucinations. In decay and decline, yet saturated with secret sexuality--suggesting a heady compound of death and desire--Venice becomes for many writers what is was for Byron: both "the greenest island of my imagination" and a "sea-sodom." It also, as this book tries to show, plays a crucial role in the development of modern writing. Tanner skillfully lays before us the many ways in which this dreamlike city has been summoned up, depicted, dramatized--then rediscovered or transfigured in selected writings through the years.


Venice and the Cultural Imagination

Venice and the Cultural Imagination

Author: Michael O'Neill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1317322592

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In the era of the Grand Tour, Venice was the cultural jewel in the crown of Europe and the epitome of decadence. This edited collection of eleven essays draws on a range of disciplines and approaches to ask how Venice’s appeal has affected Western culture since 1800.


Book Synopsis Venice and the Cultural Imagination by : Michael O'Neill

Download or read book Venice and the Cultural Imagination written by Michael O'Neill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the era of the Grand Tour, Venice was the cultural jewel in the crown of Europe and the epitome of decadence. This edited collection of eleven essays draws on a range of disciplines and approaches to ask how Venice’s appeal has affected Western culture since 1800.


Henry James and the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism

Henry James and the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism

Author: Gregory Phipps

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1137590238

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This book examines the interdisciplinary foundations of pragmatism from a literary perspective, tracing the characters and settings that populate the narratives of pragmatist thought in Henry James’s work. Cultivated during a postwar era of industrial change and economic growth, pragmatism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the new shape of American intellectual identity. Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. were close friends who founded different branches of pragmatism while writing on a vast array of topics. Skeptical about philosophy, William James’s brother, Henry, stood at the margins of this group, crafting his own version of pragmatism through his novels and short stories. Gregory Phipps argues that James’s fiction weaves together the varied depictions of individuality, society, experience, and truth found in the works of Peirce, Holmes, and William James. By doing so, James brings to narrative life a defining moment in American intellectual and material history.


Book Synopsis Henry James and the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism by : Gregory Phipps

Download or read book Henry James and the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism written by Gregory Phipps and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the interdisciplinary foundations of pragmatism from a literary perspective, tracing the characters and settings that populate the narratives of pragmatist thought in Henry James’s work. Cultivated during a postwar era of industrial change and economic growth, pragmatism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the new shape of American intellectual identity. Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. were close friends who founded different branches of pragmatism while writing on a vast array of topics. Skeptical about philosophy, William James’s brother, Henry, stood at the margins of this group, crafting his own version of pragmatism through his novels and short stories. Gregory Phipps argues that James’s fiction weaves together the varied depictions of individuality, society, experience, and truth found in the works of Peirce, Holmes, and William James. By doing so, James brings to narrative life a defining moment in American intellectual and material history.


The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature

The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature

Author: Jonathan Ullyot

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1107131480

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This book rethinks the influence that early medieval studies and Grail narratives had on modernist literature. Through examining several canonical works, from Henry James' The Golden Bowl to Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Ullyot argues that these texts serve as a continuation of the Grail legend inspired by medieval scholarship.


Book Synopsis The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature by : Jonathan Ullyot

Download or read book The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature written by Jonathan Ullyot and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book rethinks the influence that early medieval studies and Grail narratives had on modernist literature. Through examining several canonical works, from Henry James' The Golden Bowl to Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Ullyot argues that these texts serve as a continuation of the Grail legend inspired by medieval scholarship.


Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour

Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour

Author: Amanda Adams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-13

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1317082486

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Expanding our understanding of what it meant to be a nineteenth-century author, Amanda Adams takes up the concept of performative, embodied authorship in relationship to the transatlantic lecture tour. Adams argues that these tours were a central aspect of nineteenth-century authorship, at a time when authors were becoming celebrities and celebrities were international. Spanning the years from 1834 to 1904, Adams’s book examines the British lecture tours of American authors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain, and the American lecture tours of British writers that include Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold. Adams concludes her study with a discussion of Henry James, whose American lecture tour took place after a decades-long absence. In highlighting the wide range of authors who participated in this phenomenon, Adams makes a case for the lecture tour as a microcosm for nineteenth-century authorship in all its contradictions and complexity.


Book Synopsis Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour by : Amanda Adams

Download or read book Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour written by Amanda Adams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expanding our understanding of what it meant to be a nineteenth-century author, Amanda Adams takes up the concept of performative, embodied authorship in relationship to the transatlantic lecture tour. Adams argues that these tours were a central aspect of nineteenth-century authorship, at a time when authors were becoming celebrities and celebrities were international. Spanning the years from 1834 to 1904, Adams’s book examines the British lecture tours of American authors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain, and the American lecture tours of British writers that include Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold. Adams concludes her study with a discussion of Henry James, whose American lecture tour took place after a decades-long absence. In highlighting the wide range of authors who participated in this phenomenon, Adams makes a case for the lecture tour as a microcosm for nineteenth-century authorship in all its contradictions and complexity.


Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds

Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds

Author: Manfred Pfister

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9789042007574

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Half a millennium of English and American fantasies of Venice: this collection of essays by leading critics in the field explores the continued and continuing fascination of travellers, writers, artists, theatre workers and film makers with the amphibious and ambiguous city in the lagoon. There is hardly another place in Europe that has become so much of a palimpsest, inscribed with the fantasies, the dreams and nightmares of generations of foreigners, and this turns Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds into a particularly pertinent case study of the ways cultural difference within Europe is experienced, enacted and constructed. The essays range across five centuries - from the Renaissance to our postmodern present, from Shakespeare and his contemporary Coryate to recent novels, detective fiction and films - and, in contrast to previous studies focussing on the Grand Tour, they emphasise more recent developments and how they continue or disrupt traditional ways of perceiving - or being blind to! - Venice.


Book Synopsis Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds by : Manfred Pfister

Download or read book Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds written by Manfred Pfister and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Half a millennium of English and American fantasies of Venice: this collection of essays by leading critics in the field explores the continued and continuing fascination of travellers, writers, artists, theatre workers and film makers with the amphibious and ambiguous city in the lagoon. There is hardly another place in Europe that has become so much of a palimpsest, inscribed with the fantasies, the dreams and nightmares of generations of foreigners, and this turns Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds into a particularly pertinent case study of the ways cultural difference within Europe is experienced, enacted and constructed. The essays range across five centuries - from the Renaissance to our postmodern present, from Shakespeare and his contemporary Coryate to recent novels, detective fiction and films - and, in contrast to previous studies focussing on the Grand Tour, they emphasise more recent developments and how they continue or disrupt traditional ways of perceiving - or being blind to! - Venice.


Frantic Panoramas

Frantic Panoramas

Author: Nancy Bentley

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-05-23

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0812201248

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Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture—from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition. For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms. Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.


Book Synopsis Frantic Panoramas by : Nancy Bentley

Download or read book Frantic Panoramas written by Nancy Bentley and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture—from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition. For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms. Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.


Killing the Moonlight

Killing the Moonlight

Author: Jennifer Scappettone

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-11-25

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0231537743

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As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking conflicting responses: some modern artists and intellectuals embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice's labyrinthine premodern form and temporality, whereas others aspire to modernize by "killing the moonlight" of Venice, in the Futurists' notorious phrase. Spanning the history of literature, art, and architecture—from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover—Killing the Moonlight tracks the pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice, and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new. Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, the book redrafts the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.


Book Synopsis Killing the Moonlight by : Jennifer Scappettone

Download or read book Killing the Moonlight written by Jennifer Scappettone and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking conflicting responses: some modern artists and intellectuals embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice's labyrinthine premodern form and temporality, whereas others aspire to modernize by "killing the moonlight" of Venice, in the Futurists' notorious phrase. Spanning the history of literature, art, and architecture—from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover—Killing the Moonlight tracks the pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice, and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new. Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, the book redrafts the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.