Satirizing Modernism

<i>Satirizing Modernism</i> examines 20th-century novels that satirize avant-garde artists and authors while also using experimental techniques associated with literary modernism. These novels-such as Wyndham Lewis's <i>The Apes of God</i> William Gaddis's <i>The Recognitions</i> and Gilbert Sorrentino's <i>Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things</i>-were under-recognized and received poor reviews at the time of publication but have increasingly been acknowledged as both groundbreaking and deeply influential. <i>Satirizing Modernism</i> analyzes these novels in order to present an alternative account of literary modernism which should be viewed neither as a radical break with the past nor an outmoded set of aesthetics overtaken by a later postmodernism. In self-reflexively critiquing their own aesthetics these works express an unconventional modernism that both revises literary history and continues to be felt today.