A Political Economy of Modernism

In A Political Economy of Modernism Ronald Schleifer examines the political economy of what he calls ''the culture of modernism'' by focusing on literature and the arts; intellectual disciplines of post-classical economics; and institutional structures of corporate capitalism and the lower middle-class. In its wide ranging study focused on modernist writers (Dreiser Hardy Joyce Stevens Woolf Wells Wharton Yeats) modernist artists (Czanne Picasso Stravinsky Schoenberg) economists (Jevons Marshall Veblen) and philosophers (Benjamin Jakobson Russell) this book presents an institutional history of cultural modernism in relation to the intellectual history of Enlightenment ethos and the social history of the second Industrial Revolution. It articulates a new method of analysis of the early twentieth century - configuration and modeling - that reveals close connections among its arts understandings and social organizations.