This study of early 20th-century literary and artistic culture focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years. In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, the author argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits. In his theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history.
- ISBN10 0520210352
- ISBN13 9780520210356
- Publish Date 25 February 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 15 November 2006
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of California Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 280
- Language English