Recovering the New: Transatlantic Roots of Modernism

Historians and cultural critics have customarily viewed modernism as a movement with western European origins that established an aesthetic in opposition to mass culture. In sharp contrast to these established views, Edward S. Cutler argues that modernity is best understood as a translantic urban phenomenon and that aesthetic practices which consolidate under modernism in the early 20th century are themselves historically implicated in the very mass culture against which they declared “autono…