The essence of Modernism - the aesthetic and intellectual movement that
virtually reinvented art and literature at the turn of the twentieth
century - is the thrust of the latest volume from Daniel R. Schwarz. In
Reconfiguring Modernism, Schwarz suggests diverse directions for
studying the relationship between modern art and modern literature.
Bringing together thirty years of experience on the subject and drawing
upon specific texts and paintings, Schwarz proposes interrelationships
between such striking pairs of artists as Gauguin and Joseph Conrad,
Manet and Henry James, and Cezanne and T. S. Eliot, as well as a
triptych consisting of Picasso, Stevens, and Joyce. He focuses on the
high Modernist period from 1890 to 1940 and examines the way in which we
"read" paintings as narrative. Reconfiguring Modernism provocatively
discusses the reading of intertextual relationships between modern
painters and modern authors, and sheds new light on the influence of
African, Asian, and Pacific cultures on European Modernism.