eBook - PDF
The First Moderns
Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
A lively and accessible history of Modernism, The First Moderns is filled with portraits of genius, and intellectual breakthroughs, that richly evoke the fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Paris, Vienna, St. Louis, and St. Petersburg. William Everdell offers readers an invigorating look at the unfolding of an age.
"This exceptionally wide-ranging history is chock-a-block with anecdotes, factoids, odd juxtapositions, and useful insights. Most impressive. . . . For anyone interested in learning about late 19th- and early 20th- century imaginative thought, this engagingly written book is a good place to start."—Washington Post Book World
"The First Moderns brilliantly maps the beginning of a path at whose end loom as many diasporas as there are men."—Frederic Morton, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"In this truly exciting study of the origins of modernist thought, poet and teacher Everdell roams freely across disciplinary lines. . . . A brilliant book that will prove useful to scholars and generalists for years to come; enthusiastically recommended."—Library Journal, starred review
"Everdell has performed a rare service for his readers. Dispelling much of the current nonsense about 'postmodernism,' this book belongs on the very short list of profound works of cultural analysis."—Booklist
"Innovative and impressive . . . [Everdell] has written a marvelous, erudite, and readable study."-Mark Bevir, Spectator
"A richly eclectic history of the dawn of a new era in painting, music, literature, mathematics, physics, genetics, neuroscience, psychiatry and philosophy."—Margaret Wertheim, New Scientist
"[Everdell] has himself recombined the parts of our era's intellectual history in new and startling ways, shedding light for which the reader of The First Moderns will be eternally grateful."—Hugh Kenner, The New York Times Book Review
"Everdell shows how the idea of "modernity" arose before the First World War by telling the stories of heroes such as T. S. Eliot, Max Planck, and Georges Serault with such a lively eye for detail, irony, and ambiance that you feel as if you're reliving those miraculous years."—Jon Spayde, Utne Reader
"This exceptionally wide-ranging history is chock-a-block with anecdotes, factoids, odd juxtapositions, and useful insights. Most impressive. . . . For anyone interested in learning about late 19th- and early 20th- century imaginative thought, this engagingly written book is a good place to start."—Washington Post Book World
"The First Moderns brilliantly maps the beginning of a path at whose end loom as many diasporas as there are men."—Frederic Morton, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"In this truly exciting study of the origins of modernist thought, poet and teacher Everdell roams freely across disciplinary lines. . . . A brilliant book that will prove useful to scholars and generalists for years to come; enthusiastically recommended."—Library Journal, starred review
"Everdell has performed a rare service for his readers. Dispelling much of the current nonsense about 'postmodernism,' this book belongs on the very short list of profound works of cultural analysis."—Booklist
"Innovative and impressive . . . [Everdell] has written a marvelous, erudite, and readable study."-Mark Bevir, Spectator
"A richly eclectic history of the dawn of a new era in painting, music, literature, mathematics, physics, genetics, neuroscience, psychiatry and philosophy."—Margaret Wertheim, New Scientist
"[Everdell] has himself recombined the parts of our era's intellectual history in new and startling ways, shedding light for which the reader of The First Moderns will be eternally grateful."—Hugh Kenner, The New York Times Book Review
"Everdell shows how the idea of "modernity" arose before the First World War by telling the stories of heroes such as T. S. Eliot, Max Planck, and Georges Serault with such a lively eye for detail, irony, and ambiance that you feel as if you're reliving those miraculous years."—Jon Spayde, Utne Reader
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access The First Moderns by William R. Everdell in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & History of Art. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Chicago PressYear
2009Print ISBN
9780226224817, 9780226224800eBook ISBN
9780226224848Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Introduction: What Modernism Is and What It Probably Isn’t
- 2. The Century Ends in Vienna: Modernism’s Time Lost, 1899
- 3. Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob Frege: What Is a Number, 1872–1883
- 4. Ludwig Boltzmann: Statistical Gases, Entropy, and the Direction of Time, 1872–1877
- 5. Georges Seurat: Divisionism, Cloisonnism, and Chronophotography, 1885
- 6. Whitman, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue: Poems without Meter, 1886
- 7. Santiago Ramón y Cajal: The Atoms of Brain, 1889
- 8. Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau: Inventing the Concentration Camp, 1896
- 9. Sigmund Freud: Time Repressed and Ever-Present, 1899
- 10. The Century Begins in Paris: Modernism on the Verge, 1900
- 11. Hugo de Vries and Max Planck: The Gene and the Quantum, 1900
- 12. Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl: Phenomenology, Number, and the Fall of Logic, 1901
- 13. Edwin S. Porter: Parts at Sixteen per Second, 1903
- 14. Meet Me in Saint Louis: Modernism Comes to Middle America, 1904
- 15. Albert Einstein: The Space-Time Interval and the Quantum of Light, 1905
- 16. Pablo Picasso: Seeing All Sides, 1906–1907
- 17. August Strindberg: Staging a Broken Dream, 1907
- 18. Arnold Schoenberg: Music in No Key, 1908
- 19. James Joyce: The Novel Goes to Pieces, 1909–1910
- 20. Vassily Kandinsky: Art with No Object, 1911–1912
- 21. Annus Mirabilis: Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg, 1913
- 22. Discontinuous Epilogues: Heisenberg and Bohr, Gödel and Turing, Merce Cunningham and Michel Foucault
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index