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Literary Criticism General

Legitimizing the Artist

Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885-1915

by (author) Luca Somigli

Publisher
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Initial publish date
Dec 2003
Category
General, European, Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802037619
    Publish Date
    Dec 2003
    List Price
    $81.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442659360
    Publish Date
    Dec 2003
    List Price
    $35.95

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Description

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the production of literary and cultural manifestoes enjoyed a veritable boom and accompanied the rise of many avant-garde movements. Legitimizing the Artist considers this phenomenon as a response to a more general crisis of legitimation that artists had been struggling with for decades. The crucial question for artists, confronted by the conservative values of the dominant bourgeoisie and the economic logic of triumphant capitalism, was how to justify their work in terms that did not reduce art to a mere commodity.

 

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 siécle 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.

About the author

Luca Somigli is an associate professor in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto.

Luca Somigli's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, AAIS Book Award, American Association of Italian Studies

Editorial Reviews

‘In considering nascent modern art's uneasy relation to its transformed circumstances through the form of the Futurist Manifesto, Professor Somigli makes a valuable addition to an already cramped field.’

Times Literary Supplement

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