1913 The Cradle of Modernism

This innovative volume puts modernist literature in its cultural, intellectual, and global context, within the framework of the year 1913. This year in history was marked by many critical events and happenings, such as the first international recognition of non-western writers when the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Rabindranath Tagore, and it was the year before the eruption of the First World War. 1913 simultaneously examines a number of diverse artistic, literary, and political endeavours; for example, while Yeats and Pound were collaborating at Stone Cottage and discovering Japanese culture, Joyce was completing his autobiographical novel in Trieste, Du Bois was creating his Ethiopian pageant in New York and Paris was resounding with the scandal caused by Stravinsky's contested Rite of Spring. The book also explores Pound's Personae next to Apollinaire's Alcools and Rilke's Spanish Trilogy, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country next to Proust's Swann's Way. Engaging and insightful, this volume will encourage the reader to appreciate the breadth of activity and influence that occurred at this time.

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading figure among the generation of French theorists taught by Derrida and by Lacan. His books include the Blackwell Manifesto volume The Future of Theory (2002), The Ghosts of Modernity (1996), Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (2001), Jacques Lacan and Literature (2001), and Given: 1) Art, 2) Crime (2006). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan (2002), Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (1997), and the Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies (2004).