Back to the Futurists

The avant-garde and its legacy

Elza Adamowicz, Simona Storchi, Elza Adamowicz, Simona Storchi

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781526116871
  9780719090530
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526102010
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

In 1909 the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Founding Manifesto of Futurism was published on the front page of Le Figaro. Between 1909 and 1912 the Futurists published over thirty manifestos, celebrating speed and danger, glorifying war and technology, and advocating political and artistic revolution. This collection of essays aims to reassess the activities of the Italian Futurist movement from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its activities and legacies in the field of poetry, painting, sculpture, theatre, cinema, advertising and politics.

The essays offer exciting new readings in gender politics, aesthetics, historiography, intermediality and interdisciplinarity. They explore the works of major players of the movement as well as its lesser-known figures, and the often critical impact of Futurism on contemporary or later avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Dada and Vorticism.

The publication will be of interest to scholars and students of European art, literature and cultural history, as well as to the informed general public.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Elza Adamowicz and Simona Storchi
• 1 Engaging the crowd: the Futurist manifesto as avant-garde advertisement
• 2 Heroes/heroines of Futurist culture: oltreuomo/oltredonna
• 3 ‘Out of touch’: F. T. Marinetti’s Il tattilismo and the Futurist critique of separation
• 4 La bomba-romanzo esplosivo, or Dada’s burning heart
• 5 Futurist canons and the development of avant-garde historiography (Futurism – Expressionism – Dada)
• 6 ‘An infinity of living forms, representative of the absolute’? Reading Futurism with Pierre Albert-Birot as witness, creative collaborator and dissenter
• 7 The dispute over simultaneity: Boccioni – Delaunay, interpretational error or Bergsonian practice?
• 8 Fernand Léger’s La noce: the bride stripped bare?
• 9 Nocturnal itineraries: Occultism and the metamorphic self in Florentine Futurism
• 10 ‘A hysterical hullo-bulloo about motor cars’: the Vorticist critique of Futurism, 1914–1919
• 11 Futurist Performance, 1910–1916
• 12 Le Roi Bombance: the original Futurist cookbook?
• 13 The cult of the ‘expressive’ in Italian Futurist poetry: new challenges to reading
• 14 Visual approaches to Futurist aeropoetry
• 15 The Untameables: language and politics in Gramsci and Marinetti
• 16 The dark side of Futurism: Marinetti and technological war
• 17 Rethinking interdisciplinarity: Futurist cinema as metamedium
• 18 A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow: Luca Buvoli and the legacy of Futurism
• Index