Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde

In this study of Moore and the visual arts, Joyce is interested in the bifurcation between modernism and the avant-garde. Instead of viewing Moore's poetry as typically and provincially American, the author places her in the international and radical art movements of the early twentieth century. She also shows how art productions serve to break down and re-create cultural practice, proving that culture is a mutable organism, reluctant to change. Illustrated.