Poetry of the Revolution Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-gardes

<p><i>Poetry of the Revolution</i> tells the story of political and artistic upheavals through the manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ranging from the <i>Communist Manifesto</i> to the manifestos of the 1960s and beyond, it highlights the varied alliances and rivalries between socialism and repeated waves of avant-garde art. Martin Puchner argues that the manifesto--what Marx called the "poetry" of the revolution--was the genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambitions and desires. When it intruded into the sphere of art, the manifesto created an art in its own image: shrill and aggressive, political and polemical. The result was "manifesto art"--combinations of manifesto and art that fundamentally transformed the artistic landscape of the twentieth century.<br><br><br> Central to modern politics and art, the manifesto also measures the geography of modernity. The translations, editions, and adaptations of such texts as the <i>Communist Manifesto</i> and the <i>Futurist Manifesto</i> registered and advanced the spread of revolutionary modernity and of avant-garde movements across Europe and to the Americas. The rapid diffusion of these manifestos was made "possible by networks--such as the successive socialist internationals and international avant-garde movements--that connected Santiago and Zurich, Moscow and New York, London and Mexico City. <i>Poetry of the Revolution</i> thus provides the point of departure for a truly global analysis of modernism and modernity.</p>