Legitimizing the artist : manifesto writing and European modernism, 1885-1915 /
Luca Somigli.
- viii, 296 pages ; 24 cm.
- Toronto Italian studies .
- Toronto Italian studies. .
Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-283) and index.
Introduction: The Artist in Modernity -- Strategies of Legitimation: The Manifesto from Politics to Aesthetics -- A History of the Manifesto (1550-1850) -- How to be a Decadent: Art, Politics, and Society in the -- Manifestoes of Anatole Baju -- A Poetics of Modernity: Futurism as the Overturning of Aestheticism -- From Decadentism to Futurism -- Advertising Futurism -- Anarchists and Scientists: Futurism in England and the Formation of Imagism -- 'Crazy Exploding Pictures': The Reception of Futurism in England, 1910-1914 -- The Invention of Imagism: Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of the Avant-Garde. 1. 2. 3.
"In this work Luca Somigli discusses several European artistic movements - decadentism, Italian futurism, vorticism, and imagism - and argues for the centrality of the works of F.T. Marinetti in the transition from a fin de siecle decadent poetics, exemplified by the manifestoes of Anatole Baju, to a properly avant-garde project aiming at a complete renewal of the process of literary communication and the abolition of the difference between producer and consumer. It is to this challenge that the English avant-garde artists, and Ezra Pound in particular, responded with their more polemical pieces. Somigli suggests that this debate allows us to rethink the relationship between modernism and post-modernism as complementary ways of engaging the loss of an organic relationship between the artist and his social environment."--BOOK JACKET.