History of a Shiver

Jed Rasula is the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia. His previous books include This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 2004).

• Table of Contents ; Preface: The Language of the Listening Eye ; Introduction: Oblique Modernism ; I. Listening to Incense: Melomania and the Pathos of Emancipation ; II. Sublime Impudence: Synaesthesia and Music from Romanticism to Modernism ; III. Wagnerism: A Telephone from the Beyond ; IV. Drawing a Blank: Symbolist Retraction ; V. Afternoon of a Faun: Pictorialism, Dance, and the American Arcady ; VI. Fourth Dimension, Sixth Sense: or Sublime Impudence Revisited ; VII. Endless Melody: A Theoretical Excursion ; Coda: Moments, Monuments, and Modernism ; Bibliography

History of Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism and Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory are companion volumes carving forking paths from early German Romanticism through Wagnerism to the proliferation of international avant-gardes and the global convulsions of jazz before following the ungrounding of these upheavals back to prehistoric precedents in cave painting, reading modernism as a "renaissance of the archaic." With the prodigious and perhaps unprecedented range and variety of materials these volumes convene across nine hundred pages, Rasula has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to develop a research practice and a prose style adequate to the sheer profusion of modernist precedent.