Nordlit: Tidsskrift i litteratur og kultur (May 2007)

Martin Puchner, <i>Poetry of the Revolution. Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes</i> 2006.

  • Hubert van den Berg

DOI
https://doi.org/10.7557/13.1789
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 1

Abstract

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The genre of the manifesto belongs to the key elements of avant-garde textuality. As such, the manifesto has received considerable attention in recent avant-garde research. Many articles, chapters in general studies on the avant-garde, several collections of essays, monographs and annotated anthologies have been devoted to the manifesto in the past decades. Martin Puchner's book on the avant-garde manifesto is a latecomer in this context, published some ten years after a wave of Manifestantismus struck in particular continental European avant-garde research. As in the case of any late arrival, the main question is self-evidently: what adds Puchner to already existing literature? The answer must be rather ambivalent. Puchner's book definitely fills a lacuna in the Anglophone historiography of the avant-garde.

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