The first anthology of its kind, "Manifesto" features over two hundred artistic and cultural manifestos from a wide range of countries. The manifesto, a public statement that sets forth the tenets of a forthcoming, existing, or potential movement or 'ism' - or that plays on the idea of one - became in various modernisms a crucial and forceful vehicle for artists, writers, and other intellectuals to express their ideas about the direction of aesthetics and society. Included in this collection are texts ranging from Kurt Schwitters' "Cow Manifesto" to those written in the name of well-known movements - imagism, cubism, surrealism, symbolism, vorticism, and projectivism - and less well-known ones - lettrism, acmeism, concretism, and rayonism. Also covered are expressionist, Dada, and futurist movements from French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Latin American perspectives, as well as local movements, such as Brazilian hallucinism.
Influential, startling, unsettling, amusing, and continually engaging, these modernist manifestos give voice to a fascinating array of ideas and opinions that will prove invaluable to scholars and students of nineteenth and twentieth-century art, literature, and culture. Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author, editor, or translator of over forty books, including "The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter" and "The Surrealist Painters and Poets".