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Modernism and the Culture of Market Society

John Xiros Cooper author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:24th Sep '09

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Modernism and the Culture of Market Society cover

A broad-ranging 2004 study exploring the relation between the modernist avant-garde and capitalist culture.

For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. In this 2004 book, he argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomised the impact of capitalism on everyday life.Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial values of market-driven society. For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. He argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomised the impact of capitalism on everyday life. Cooper shows how the new social, cultural and economic practices aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterising techniques, styles and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. In this broad-ranging 2004 study John Xiros Cooper explores this provocative theme across a wide range of Modernist authors, including Joyce, Eliot, Stein and Barnes.

Review of the hardback: '… I would urge anyone working on modernism to go away and read. … John Xiros Cooper's passionately argued Modernism and the Culture of Market Society … his is a brilliant polemic. This is an unremittingly materialist analysis … that situates modernism in relation to the complex process of economic, technological, social and political modernization that created it.' Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

ISBN: 9780521120111

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 17mm

Weight: 440g

300 pages