M.A. Caws (ed.) Manifesto: A Century of Isms (London, 2001)

0803264070

Synopsis

This anthology features over 200 artistic and cultural manifestos from a wide range of countries. The manifesto, a public statement that sets forth the tenets of a forthcoming, existing, or potential movement or ism-or that plays on the idea of one – became in various modernisms a crucial and forceful vehicle for artists, writers, and other intellectuals to express their ideas about the direction of aesthetics and society. Included in this collection are texts ranging from Kurt Schwitters ‘s Cow Manifesto to those written in the name of well – known movements – imagism, cubism, surrealism, symbolism, vorticism, projectivism – and less well – known ones – lettrism, acmeism, concretism, rayonism. Also covered are expressionist, Dada, and futurist movements from French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Latin American perspectives, as well as local movements, such as Brazilian hallucinism. Influential, startling, unsettling, amusing, and continually engaging, these modernist manifestos give voice to an array of ideas and opinions that should be valuable to scholars and students of 19 th and 20 th- century art, literature, and culture.