Constellation of Genius
1922: Modernism and All That Jazz
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
1922. The spectacular year that F. Scott Fitzgerald chose as a backdrop for his most famous novel The Great Gatsby. It was also the year where James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published, Alfred Hitchcock directed his first feature, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Louis Armstrong took the train from New Orleans to Chicago and made Jazz the defining music of the age, and Hollywood transformed the nature of fame.
Constellation of Genius is the gloriously entertaining journey through the diaries of the actors, anthropologists, artists, dancers, designers, film-makers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians and scientists whose lives and works collided over twelve months, creating a frenzy of innovation and the beginning of a new era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this "biography" of 1922, Jackson narrates the landmark year during which both James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland first appeared in print. Jackson (The Worlds of John Ruskin) offers a month-by-month and even day-by-day narrative of that year's cultural and political events, as modernists sought a radical reinvention of art and political upheaval spread worldwide. Though the story most extensively tracks the movements of Joyce, Eliot, and Ezra Pound, the cast of characters is enormous, including every significant cultural, artistic, and political figure of the time: Hemingway, Stein, Picasso, Breton, Cocteau, Proust, Chanel, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Lorca, Armstrong, Stravinsky, Mussolini, and many, many more. Providing brief, lively snapshots of these players, the story roves restlessly around the globe, from Hollywood to Paris to Moscow, leaping as far afield as Peru, China, and Australia. Jackson doesn't attempt a new interpretation of modernism or even of its seminal works, aiming instead at a comprehensive, international story of modernism's "year one" through deft sketches. Despite its manic shifts and cumbersome footnotes, this ambitious and approachable volume overflows with absorbing anecdotes and remarkable personalities. With clearly epic aspirations himself, Jackson casts the well-known story of modernism in a new and instructive light.
