Description: A sweeping cultural history that draws on music, literature, painting, and film, History of a Shiver uncovers how art pioneered in the nineteenth century provided the foundation for modernist aesthetics.
Review Quotes: "History of Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism and Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory are companion volumes carving forking paths from early German Romanticism through Wagnerism to the proliferation of international avant-gardes and the global convulsions of jazz before following the ungrounding of these upheavals back to prehistoric precedents in cave painting, reading modernism as a "renaissance of the archaic." With the prodigious and perhaps unprecedented range and variety of materials these volumes convene across nine hundred pages, Rasula has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to develop a research practice and a prose style adequate to the sheer profusion of modernist precedent." -- Nathan Brown, Boundary 2
"Breathtaking and beautifully written, Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism is a masterpiece of modernist criticism. Drawing on a vast archive of texts, paintings, scripts, scores, and historical anecdotes, Rasula traces the genealogies of modernism across the arts." --Modern Language Association"Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver fundamentally rewrites the genealogy of modernism. Much studied, modernism has become comfortably familiar. Rasula's vastly learned and lucid study defamiliarizes it again, recovering the inherent strangeness and polymorphism of modernist art and aesthetics and embedding them in a dazzling network of cross-references--some inevitable, some surprising, some long forgotten, but all fascinating." --Lawrence Kramer, author of Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge"Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver makes a handsome addition to the growing corpus of modernist criticism. A compelling cultural history that brings many polyphonic strands of debate together, it provides a necessary refinement of both modernism's history and the interplay of its constituent ideas." --Simon Shaw-Miller, author of Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage"Rasula has composed a book of striking intellectual virtuosity and wide historical reach. The unsettlements of Modernism--its mixing of forms, its synesthestic longings, its Wagnerism, its unreconciled self-surpassing vigor-have never been more vividly rendered. Written with a verve and provocation worthy of its subject, History of a Shiver deserves immediate attention and long patient study." --Michael Levenson, author of Modernism"Essential."--Choice