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

“What drives creative artists to turn back later in their careers to the subject matter of their earlier years and reimagine it, reclaim it, or rewrite it? This rich and timely collection asks what prompts this “backward look,” resisting standard reductive formations such as ‘late style’ in order to assert the sheer diversity of reasons for artistic return, in the process reaching far beyond the usual suspects in the canon of late-life creativity – and indeed, in one memorable case, beyond the grave.”

—Gordon McMullan, Professor of English at King's College London and Director of the London Shakespeare Centre, UK.

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.

Mette Gieskes is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Radboud University, The Netherlands. Her publications include articles on Philip Guston, Sol LeWitt, Francis Alÿs, Tamara Muller, and Otobong Nkanga. Gieskes is co-editor of Humor in Global Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury 2024, with Gregory Williams). 

Mathilde Roza is Associate Professor of North American Literature and North American Studies at Radboud University, the Netherlands. She has published on American modernism and the international avant-garde, American Modernist author Robert Myron Coates, The New Yorker magazine, Native North American visual art and literature, indigenous soldiers in WWII, cultural  diversity, and cultural diplomacy.