Groups, Coteries, Circles and Guilds

"In the first few decades of the twentieth century, artists, intellectuals, writers, thinkers and patrons gave birth to groups and movements in Europe and the United States, with the aim of providing alternatives to the increasingly conflictual political and intellectual climate. This book offers studies of under-researched (and often consciously provincial) avant-garde and modernist groups and authors. Their progressive aims are here read as particular forms of utopia based on the ethics and aesthetics of community. The essays in this volume analyse the significance (and failures) of literary coteries as spaces of aesthetic and political freedom. They explore the internationalist and interdisciplinary practices of the Porza Group, the abstrakten hannover and the anthroposophical group Aenigma; the utopian efforts of the artists' communities at Monte Verita (Switzerland), Farley Farm, Ditchling and Millthorpe in England; the political and aesthetic implications of collaborative practices of cultural mediation, criticism and translation with the Bloomsbury group, the "Young American Critics", and of single individuals in relation to networks, such as Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Lola Ridge. The volume offers an evaluation of the ethos of sociability in the women's salons of the Enlightenment, as the basis of the utopia of community; it also reflects on the problematic notion of individual authorship within a group, as in the case of the early-modernist Finnish author Algot Untola, who created circa forty fictitious author-names"--