Revolutions in Art and Ideas at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

At the turn of the twentieth century every field in the world of arts and ideas experienced a revolution which turned that field upside down. This book, written and edited by eight scholars from different disciplines, consists of a wide-ranging primary source anthology and a new interpretation of the intellectual and artistic revolutions around the turn-of-the-century period. The primary source material is placed into three overlapping sets: WORLD explores the conception of a newly emerging, heterogeneous, urban world; SELF concerns the perception of a new type of self which was independent, non-rational, and natural; FORM examines the subordination of traditional subject matter to a concern for innovative form and structure. Each of these categories is introduced by several pages of analysis, and each selection is separately introduced.