Modernisms

PETER NICHOLLS is Professor of English and American Literature and Director of The Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex, UK.

• Preface to the Second EditionList of AbbreviationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Of a Certain ToneIronies of the ModernBreaking the Rules: Symbolism in FranceDecadence and the Art of DeathPaths to the FutureA Metaphysics of Modernity: Marinetti and Italian FuturismOther Spaces: French Cubism and Russian FuturismCruel Structures: The Development of ExpressionismModernity and the `Men of 1914'At a Tangent: Other ModernismsAfrican American ModernismFrom Fantasy to Structure: Dada and Neo-ClassicismOther Times: The Narratives of High ModernismDeath and Desire: The Surrealist AdventureNotesBibliographyIndex.

'With the precision of a global positioning system, Peter Nicholls scans the width and breadth of literary modernism. This new edition of his classic study provides a lucid and useful overview of the often antithetical tendencies that revolutionized the literature of Europe and America in the first decades of the twentieth century. New maps sweep clean: Modernisms sets the record-straight by looking aslant, restoring 'tangents' to the main stage of a play that continues to inform most of our present-day literary imaginings' - Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, USA 'When Modernisms appeared in 1995, I wrote that it was "the very best single study of its subject currently available". For this new edition, Nicholls has added a dazzling, compact, remarkably comprehensive chapter on African American Modernism - a chapter that dovetails beautifully with this guide's larger narrative. Always authoritative and yet deeply personal in its emphases and tastes, Nicholls's remains the single best study of literary Modernism.' - Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernhyam Professor Emerita, Stanford University, USA. 'An impressive and valuable resource - the new edition retains a distinctive character and is further improved by the addition of the new chapter on the Harlem Renaissance' - Richard Brown, University of Leeds, UK