Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885-1915

Somigli (Italian studies, U. of Toronto) considers how artists have tried to renegotiate and re-legitimate their role during profound and radical social and cultural transformations that implicitly or explicitly called into question many traditional assumptions about the arts and their place in society. She focuses on the manifesto because it is poised between the aesthetic and the political, and on the period 1880-1910 as a crucial phase of self-examination in European cultural history. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR