Books about Modernism from Amazon.com

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, providing an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. At its center are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is a tour de force of style and technique..
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Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch. --Anne Bartholomew

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A new edition of the acclaimed anthology—the most comprehensive collection of twentieth-century poetry in English available.

"The most acute rendering of an era's sensibility is its poetry," wrote the editors in their preface to the first edition. Thirty years later, this thorough and sensitive revision freshly renders the remarkable range of styles, subjects, and voices in English-language poetry, from Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy in the late nineteenth century to Carol Ann Duffy and Sherman Alexie in the twenty-first century.

With 195 poets and 1,596 poems, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry richly represents the major figures—Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Hughes, Olson, Bishop, Larkin, Plath, Rich, Heaney, and Walcott, among others. It also gives full voice to postcolonial and transnational poets, ethnic American poetries, experimental traditions, and the long poem. Each volume concludes with a Poetics section that provides essential contexts for reading the poems.

With substantially new introductions, headnotes, annotations, and bibliographies by the award-winning scholar and teacher Jahan Ramazani, this anthology is indispensable for all who love poetry. Two volumes, slipcased..
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Pivotal member of the Metaphysical Club, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, older brother of extraordinary siblings Henry and Alice, the remarkable William James put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion -- on modernism itself. In this thought-provoking and moving biography, James emerges as an immensely complex and fascinating man. Through passionate scholarship, Robert D. Richardson illuminates James's life and hugely influential works: the Varieties, Principles of Psychology, Talks to Teachers, and Pragmatism. At last, in this definitive work William James is given his due as a man whose influence resonates in innumerable areas of modern life..
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In the late '90s, publishers began to race to get a book out that would cater to the explosive interest in all things midcentury modern. There was Classic Modern, Naturally Modern, and Modernism Rediscovered, to name just a few of the better ones. With the publication of this volume by regular Architectural Digest contributor Michael Webb, we finally have a book that not only provides a plethora of design ideas we can steal for use in our very own living rooms, but also tells the often-captivating behind-the-scenes stories of each great home it showcases.

The focus here is on the saving of these houses, and Webb's text is wonderfully insightful. One of the 35 spectacular homes featured is celebrated architect John Lautner's Harvey House in Los Angeles, the very same once-dilapidated house (the book captures it in its newly restored state) over which actor Leonardo DiCaprio went head to head in a bidding war (and lost) with actress Kelly Lynch and her husband, screenwriter Mitch Glazer.

The house is a work in progress, full of difficult judgment calls. The expanded kitchen may be cut back and the original St. Charles cabinets reinstalled. The rotunda will be refined and there is a possibility of recreating the aluminum-framed glass breakfast nook--a kind of high-tech gazebo--originally located under the pergola. Meanwhile the owners and their small daughter adore living here. "At night, we can look all the way through and out at the lights of the city," says Lynch. "I find myself caught up in the spirit of the place, wander about, and forget I'm in the middle of watching a movie!"

Newly commissioned photography by Roger Straus, known for his panoramic shots of Frank Lloyd Wright structures, is another highlight. Designed and built in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s by architects such as Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, John Lautner, H.H. Harris, Gregory Ain, Paul Rudolph, John Black Lee, Allyn E. Morris, and Ulrich Franzen, the 35 homes presented here are some of the most sought after in America. If you're into modern or want to know what all the fuss is about, this is the book you'll want to own. --Richard Olsen.
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celebration of subversives: the first one-volume history of the greatest cultural movement since the Enlightenment

Peter Gay's most ambitious endeavor since Freud explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms. Beginning his epic study with Baudelaire, whose lurid poetry scandalized French stalwarts, Gay traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York. A work unique in its breadth and brilliance, Modernism presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes (among others) Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, and D. W. Griffiths; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot; Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol. Finally, Gay examines the hostility of totalitarian regimes to modernist freedom and the role of Pop Art in sounding the death knell of a movement that dominated Western culture for 120 years. Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superlative achievement by one of our greatest historians. 92 illustrations, 16 pages of color..
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"The Humanistic Tradition is quite simply the finest book of its type. Fiero manages to integrate the political, cultural, and social history of the world into one coherent and fascinating whole. It is a masterpiece of scholarship . . . balanced, interesting, easy to read, and consummately beautiful. Our professors praise its accuracy and scope and our students unanimously say it is their favorite textbook." — Sonia Sorrell, Pepperdine University

The Humanistic Tradition features a flexible, topical approach that helps students understand humankind's creative legacy as a continuum rather than as a series of isolated events. This widely acclaimed interdisciplinary survey offers a global perspective, countless illustrations, and more than 150 literary sources. Available in multiple formats, The Humanistic Tradition explores the political, economic, and social contexts of human culture, providing a global and multicultural perspective which helps students better understand the relationship between the West and other world cultures. .
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Architecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspended historical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second World War, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order to construct a coherent narrative of modernism's development, they were inevitably influenced by contemporary concerns. In Histories of the Immediate Present, Anthony Vidler examines the work of four historians of architectural modernism and the ways in which their histories were constructed as more or less overt programs for the theory and practice of design in a contemporary context.

Vidler looks at the historical approaches of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri, and the specific versions of modernism advanced by their historical narratives. Vidler shows that the modernism conceived by Kaufmann was, like the late Enlightenment projects he revered, one of pure, geometrical forms and elemental composition; that of Rowe saw mannerist ambiguity and complexity in contemporary design; Banham's modernism took its cue from the aspirations of the futurists; and the "Renaissance modernism" of Tafuri found its source in the division between the technical experimentation of Brunelleschi and the cultural nostalgia of Alberti. Vidler's investigation demonstrates the inevitable collusion between history and design that pervades all modern architectural discourse--and has given rise to some of the most interesting architectural experiments of the postwar period..
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