Modernism's Second Act A Cultural Narrative

European modernism underwent a massive change from 1930 to 1960, as war altered the cultural landscape. This account of artists and writers in France and England explores how modernism survived under authoritarianism, whether Fascism, National Socialism, or Stalinism, and how these artists endured by balancing complicity and resistance. From Picasso and Pound to Stein and Woolf - all engaged with artistic survival during this period - their tenuous creative and personal lives come under scrutiny. Nadel also considers European writers like Arthur Koestler, Herman Broch, and Margurite Dueras within the larger frame of the survival of modernism. The changes experienced by modernist artists and the impact of the atomic bomb during the mid-twentieth century propelled modernism through its second act and into postmodernism.

Ira Nadel is Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art (1994), Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (2000), Ezra Pound: A Literary Life (2004), Joyce and His Publishers (2005), The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound (2007), and David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre (2008). Nadel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar, and the winner of the 1996 Medal for Canadian Biography. He has also been awarded a Killam Research Prize, Mellon and Dorot Fellowships at the Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, and a Beinecke Fellowship at Yale.

1. Art and Occupation
2. Modernist Politics
3. Marketing Modernism