This article reviews the changes in historical writing about slavery and the slave trade over the last 50 years.

Seen in the broader context of European modernism, British modernist literature stands out through the limited role of collective avant-gardes and the conservative or reactionary politics of the writers who make up the canon of modernist poetry. This article explores how these peculiarities are replicated in the use of traditional poetic forms (metres in particular) in the works of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). As modernist (rather than avant-garde) writers, those poets rejected or backed away from free verse and simultaneously cultivated forms that harked back to older and less insular poetic traditions than the ones that dominated mainstream English poetry in the Victorian period.

Modernism and everything modern have always been identified with the avant-garde. If something had not at a certain juncture in cultural history been avant-garde, eo ipso it had also not been modern. But the history of literary Modernism shows a more complex picture. The various arrière-garde movements celebrating the regional, the traditional, the anti-urban aspects of life stood, on the one hand, in manifest contrast to the metropolitan and globally oriented Modernism, but were on the other hand also fostered by the same modernist wave from ca. 1850 onwards. I here discuss the dichotomies between the local and the global, and between the avant- and arrière-garde as constitutive of Modernism as a whole from its very beginnings.

To Darío Villanueva

In this essay I take a closer look at the international dimension of the arrière-garde. I will deal exclusively with the issue of whether being arrière-garde may play a significant role in the international canonization of a writer. My case study is based on Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), a Spanish writer with a world – that is to say, an international – literary career who nevertheless has been excluded from the Spanish national canon precisely because of being ‘arrière-gardiste’. Blasco Ibáñez's world literary career and his exclusion from the national canon are assessed from a generational viewpoint. Because of the limitations inherent to the generation method, though, I will also explore a prosopographical approach by investigating a field shared by a collective biography of writers. Notwithstanding the provisional nature of the data, the approach may contribute to a better understanding of both the arrière-garde as an international phenomenon and world literary careers.

This essay is concerned with the power of art to effect change, but also to show attachments to existing ways of understanding. Avant-garde art from Cubism to Surrealism seeks to transform the shapes in which we see the world. But change may simply create blindness to the past, and to what is, and to the way our chains are yanked by the lures of domination whether economic, social or emotional. Kundera's novelistic meditation on the canonical and radical poets Rimbaud and Éluard encourages us to wonder whether the obsession with change is an investment in the powers of oblivion and ignorance.

In French 1960s’ literature, the strategy of re-writing is associated with the New Novel and the ideological Tel Quel movement. However, a more ironical poetics of the novel can be found in Blanche ou l'oubli (1967) by Louis Aragon1 and Les Choses (1967) by Georges Perec.2 Both novels are rewritings of Gustave Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, with particular attention to that novel's main theme of ‘illusion’. The interesting question then is how literary tradition becomes a part of the meta-fictional interrogation of human experience in a particular historical context. Perec uses the rhythm of Flaubert's sentences to draw attention to the story as a construction and to his characters’ lack of significance. Aragon foregrounds the novel's capacity of holding on to experience as such, with autobiography (Flaubert's as well as his own) linked to materialistic-historical conditions. Ultimately, in following the writer's reading of the historical work, the reader must seek what literature offers him or her the opportunity to apprehend his/her own conditions for experience.