The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism

Description

Much of the literary and cultural theory developed throughout the twentieth century relied on modernist texts and artefacts as both example and paradigm. This Dictionary collects, categorises and intersects literary, aesthetic, political and cultural terms that in one way or another came into being through the debates, conflicts, co-operations, experiments – individual and collective – that characterised modernism. In concise entries from international experts, it presents the terms, categories, concepts, tropes, movements, forged through the modernist upheavals (at once aesthetic and political), highlighting their genealogy, their modernist ‘newness’, and their historical longevity.

Key Features

Provides new and authoritative definitions of the revolutionary art, thinking and intellectual culture which flourished in the opening decades of the last century
Demonstrates the ways in which modernism reconceptualised and realigned all twentieth- century art forms while also formulating the critical and cultural languages of that century
Shows that modernism, in unique ways, already entailed its self-definition and articulated its own critique