Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- 5 Edwardians to Georgians
- 6 The avant-garde, bohemia and mainstream culture
- 7 ‘Our London, my London, your London’: the Modernist moment in the metropolis
- 8 Futurism, literature and the market
- 9 Literature and World War I
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
6 - The avant-garde, bohemia and mainstream culture
from PART TWO - THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- 5 Edwardians to Georgians
- 6 The avant-garde, bohemia and mainstream culture
- 7 ‘Our London, my London, your London’: the Modernist moment in the metropolis
- 8 Futurism, literature and the market
- 9 Literature and World War I
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Between the artistic avant-garde and that cultural stratum called, since the 1840s, ‘bohemia’, there is a historical relationship that is almost self-evident yet difficult precisely to characterise. Both avant-garde and bohemia depend on a stance of separation from the putative mainstream of culture, a conservative, moralising, middle-brow taste of the ‘bourgeois’, the ‘philistine’, or ‘man in the street’. Both seek programmatically to break down barriers between art and life and to fuse them in a integral aestheticisation of everyday life; this, in turn, should invest art with greater existential intensity than in its traditional forms. Both are marked by ambiguous ties to popular culture and more generally to the commercial market in cultural goods; they appear alternately to repel and invite success in the monetary terms of capitalist societies. Indeed, both appear to have their origins in a particular historical matrix: the broad social front of progressive, oppositional elements of the middle-classes in France up to the 1848 uprisings. This social milieu had aspects of both a political and cultural vanguard, and only later, in the course of the reaction that followed the suppression of the mid-century revolutions, would the avant-garde artist proper precipitate out as a distinct social identity. It is a commonplace of cultural history, and by no means a merely banal one, that the avant-garde and bohemia occupy overlapping cultural spaces and exhibit parallel gestures; that the avant-garde, indeed, emerges in some way within the milieu of bohemia and lends the figure of the bohemian a new, reinvigorating stamp.
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- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature , pp. 100 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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