Ephemeral Bibelots

How an International Fad Buried American Modernism
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4214-3155-0
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 476 g

Reihe: Hopkins Studies in Modernism

Restoring proto-modernist little magazines—known as ephemeral bibelots—to the scholarly canon.

Emanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as "ephemeral bibelots." For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness, astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siècle color schemes, innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism.

In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans relays the untold story of this late-nineteenth-century craze for bibelots, dusting off a trove of periodicals largely untouched by digitization. In excavating this forgotten archive, Evans calls into question the prehistory of modernist little magazines as well as the history of American art and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Considering how artistic movements take shape, move, and disappear, the book is organized around three major themes—"vogue," "ephemera," and "obscurity"—with authors and artists to match. A full-color insert reveals a glorious array of bibelot covers.

This revisionary history of print culture incorporates discussions of pragmatist philosophy and relational aesthetics; women writers like Juliet Wilbor Tompkins and Carolyn Wells; the graphic artists Will Bradley, Louis Rhead, and John Sloan; the dancer Loie Fuller; and twentieth-century figures like H. L. Mencken, Amy Lowell, and Anita Loos. Bringing nineteenth-century American literature and culture into conversation with modern art movements from around the world, Ephemeral Bibelots provides new ways of thinking about the centrality of various media cultures to the attribution of aesthetic innovation and its staying power.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Evans, Brad

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue. The Black Cat Goes Walking
Introduction. The Ephemeral Bibelots
Chapter One. Gelett Burgess and the Flight from Reality
Chapter Two. What Travels? What Doesn't? The International Movement of Movements
Chapter Three. Relating in Henry James
Chapter Four. Butterflies, Faddishness, and the Iconography of Desire
Chapter Five. The Edginess of Stephen Crane at the End of the Relational Era
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Evans, Brad
Brad Evans is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920, and the coeditor of Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema.

Brad Evans is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920, and the coeditor of Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema.