Modernism, Aesthetics and Anthropology

Argues that a combination of aesthetics and anthropology allowed modernist writers to challenge nineteenth century social hierarchies.

John Hoffmann (Author)

9781009474474, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 January 2025

326 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

John Hoffmann argues that a combination of aesthetics and anthropology allowed modernist writers to challenge social hierarchies they associated with the nineteenth century. He shows how Enlightenment philosophers synthesized the two discourses and how modernists working in the early twentieth century then took up this synthesis to dispute categories of social difference that had been naturalized, and thus legitimized, by pre-evolutionary and Darwinian anthropological theories. The book brings a range of new insights to major topics in modernist studies, revealing neglected continental sources for Irish anti-colonialism, the aesthetic contours of Zionism in the era of Mandatory Palestine, and the influence of German idealism on critiques of racism following World War I. Working over a long historical durée, Hoffmann surveys the ways aesthetics has been used, and misused, to construct and contest social hierarchies grounded in anthropological distinctions.

Introduction
Part I: 1. Anthropology from an aesthetic point of view
2. Ideals of beauty
3. Militant neoclassicism
Part II: 4. Philosophers of the cabal
5. Prometheus found
6. Socialist realism, socialist expressionism
Coda: Eusynoptos
Bibliography
Notes.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]