Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music

Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary book investigates the various ways in which North American and European modern and contemporary artists, authors, and musicians have returned to earlier works of their own, engaging in inventive revivals and transformations of the past in the present. The book is distinctive in its focus on such revisits, as well as in the diversity of art forms under review: in addition to visual art, the book explores fiction, poetry, literary criticism, film, rock music, and philosophy. This scope, together with the time-span covered in the book, from the 1850s to the twenty-first century, allows for a broad view on retrospection and revision. The case studies presented here offer a multifaceted exploration of the widely different goals to which practitioners of the arts have made retrospection and revision functional against the background of cultural, social, political, and personal forces.