This book explores the realities, and the fantasies, of ‘movement’ and ‘motion’ in the context of the modernisms of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical, and political; affective and physiological; temporal and epochal; technological, locomotive, and metropolitan; aesthetic and representational. The volume is divided into the following sections: ‘Times and Places’; ‘Horizons’; ‘Energies and Quantities’; ‘Avant-Gardes’; ‘Discourses/Voices’; ‘Motion Studies’. Individual chapters d ... More

This book explores the realities, and the fantasies, of ‘movement’ and ‘motion’ in the context of the modernisms of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical, and political; affective and physiological; temporal and epochal; technological, locomotive, and metropolitan; aesthetic and representational. The volume is divided into the following sections: ‘Times and Places’; ‘Horizons’; ‘Energies and Quantities’; ‘Avant-Gardes’; ‘Discourses/Voices’; ‘Motion Studies’. Individual chapters discuss modernism’s complex geographies, including those ‘metageographies’ and ‘heterotopias’ in which space is both real and imagined, and address issues of locality and regionalism, internationalism, and transnationalism, borders and diaspora, and cosmopolitanism and translation. Further concerns include modernism’s relationship to, and the periodization of, cultural and social modernity. Chapters also engage with the topics of a ‘networked modernism’, with modernist primitivism, and with cultural, political, and literary movements in the modernist period. Questions of motion, scale, measurement, and mood emerge in explorations of modernist and avant-garde art, poetics, and performance, including the work of Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Kafka, Stein, Duchamp, Cocteau, and Yeats, as well as writers of the mid-twentieth century. In the final section of the volume, ‘Motion Studies’, ‘movement’ and ‘motion’ are explored in relation to the complex and paradoxical dimensions of the ‘moving image’, bound up as it is with the stasis or stillness of the photograph or photogram, and in relation to speed, travel, transport and transit in modernity.