Pirandello is one of the most famous and important cultural figures of Italian modernism, and his work is deeply invested in responding to the rapidly changing forces of modernization. This chapter examines his complex relationship with modernity through a comparison to the Italian avant-garde movement of Futurism: Where the Futurists were focused on using their cultural production to usher in and intensify processes of technological modernization, Pirandello’s stance is more complex and ambivalent. The chapter thus traces their responses to a shared set of cultural conditions, spanning from a shared rejection of scientific materialism and positivism to engagement with new models of sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and finally considers their divergent views of cinema and the promise of technology to transform the future.

This chapter describes the literary milieu of nineteenth-century Italy and considers the influence of a range of different literary schools on Puccini’s artistic practice. It endeavours to understand exactly what is meant by operatic verismo – a contested term – and to trace the term’s relationship to literary verismo. Some of the key Italian literary movements of the nineteenth century, such as neo-classicism, had little impact on Puccini’s oeuvre; others were far more influential, such as the Scapigliatura movement, which appeared in northern Italy in the 1860s. Key figures involved in this movement were connected with the circles in which Puccini moved. The literary verismo movement – centred on the Italian south – is discussed in detail and direct connections are drawn between this movement and Puccini’s style in works such as Il tabarro. The author also traces the relevance for a consideration of Puccini’s oeuvre with such movements as decadentism, crepuscolarismo, hermeticism, modernism, and futurism.

This chapter provides a brief summary of the historical context particular to Italy before moving into an overview of key literary themes and concerns of wartime poets, including a consideration of the difference between the poet-soldier and the soldier-poet; the early enthusiasm for intervention and what was seen by some as war’s potential for national renewal; and a later ambivalence about the war on the part of many poets. Individual sections dedicated to Gabriele D’Annunzio, Vittorio Locchi, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ardengo Soffici, Clemente Rebora, Piero Jahier, Corrado Alvaro, Ugo Betti, and Umberto Saba explore and contrast the very different experiences, attitudes and styles of these nine literary figures, some far better-known than others. The final section focuses on the work of Ada Negri, one of the most important Italian women poets of the era, and her descriptions of maternal anguish on the home front.

Sophie Hackford explores the idea that the way that computers see the world is becoming our dominant reality. The idea that a physical object, and its data ‘exhaust’, are in constant dialogue with each other. As machine autonomy creeps into our everyday lives, we are creating a physical internet, where people, objects, vehicles move as seamlessly in the real world as data moves around the internet. Digital bots or ‘agents’ might represent us in interactions with our banks, friends, colleagues. Autonomous companies might soon be big players in the economy. Hackford will explore a world where human and machine ‘vision’ will collaborate, compete and even merge together.

The present state of the locations of contemporary Latina/o poetry is destabilizing. Latina/o literary legacy, tracing the lines from heritage nationalities to anti-US imperialist ancestors to civil rights–era forebears and into the twenty-first century, has always been rooted in place. Latina/o life in the United States, on the cusp of the third decade of this century, is one that accepts the fact that where we are from is more and more an internalized state of being. Bonafide Rojas’s Notes on the Return to the Island reflects a post-transnational diasporic Puerto Rican identity in which contact zones, not nationality, are sovereign. Hugo García Manríquez’s conceptualist book Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement offers radical experimentation in both aesthetics and geopolitics. Valerie Martínez’s Each and Her is rooted in the borderlands of Ciudad Juárez. Francisco Aragón’s “To Madrid” examines the touristic shame of a Latina/o visiting an ancestral place. Aracelis Girmay’s debut collection Teeth (2007) situates further aspects of the complexity of touristic experience into a range of locales. The work of Rodrigo Toscano and Edwin Torres embodies a latinxfuturism speculating on what it will mean to be Latina/o.

The chapter specifically explores the Futurist aesthetics of noise as manifested in Luigi Russolo’s ‘noise machines,’ or ‘intonarumori.’ Noise, and composition with noises, folds in with the Futurists’ general affirmation of technological modernity and with their related aesthetic practices extolling the virtues of speed, violence and war. The chapter also ponders Futurist noise and its relationship to twelve-tone dissonance, and discovers a common spiritualist thread linking these musical formal practices. For Russolo, at least, the technical and spiritualist connections relate to Leonardo da Vinci’s own plans for music machines, and his general view art’s ‘spirituality.’

This chapter connects the art and science of eating well known as gastronomy to the literary and social histories of modernism. It foregrounds how modernist writers both advance and satirize gastronomic principles of good taste and refined dining, and in doing so prompt explorations of popular versus high culture and nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The analysis compares Italian avant-garde artist and writer F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932), Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose volume (1946), and California culinary figure M.F.K. Fisher’s cookbooks from the 1940s. The Futurist Cookbook implicitly adapts the nationalism of nineteenth-century French gastronomy to the ideology of twentieth-century fascism by promoting technologically fabricated dishes and steel-like Italian citizens. In contrast, Niedecker’s New Goose uses lyric poetry to expose the hunger of small-scale farmers during the Second World War, a period when affluent gourmands continued to patronize urban restaurants. Finally, Fisher’s cookbooks employ modernist narrative techniques in the cookbook genre while expressing dissent with the broader status of gastronomy during wartime.

The Russian avant-garde arose in an age of advertising, publicity, and celebrity culture. Across the world, advances in photography, film, and print were feeding images and ideas to publics fascinated by wealth and consumption. In St. Petersburg and Moscow no less than in the other capitals of Europe, artists, writers, and performers catered to new appetites for fashion and display. The juxtaposition of publicity and art implied a radical departure from the traditionally passive role of the audience, since publicity requires the participation of the audience. Increasingly, Russian culture was commodified. Images of literary giants appeared on candy wrappers and cigarette boxes; in cheap lithographs; and then in photographs reproduced on postcards, some carrying advertising on the back. The women of Russia’s cultural circles pursued increased agency and rose to fame in the exaggerated empowerment that was part of celebrity culture. The avant-garde of both sexes courted celebrity and adopted a spirit of playfulness as they abandoned figurative forms for abstraction. They challenged conventional ideas and brought a new force – humor – to the interplay between artist and audience. In so doing, they drew on a vein of comedy that existed in both the sacred and secular traditions.

During the reign of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the advocates of freedom clashed sharply and frequently with the forces of order. The standing of the authorities suffered greatly with the humiliating loss of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. As the war was fought, domestic political unrest was also coming to a head. On “Bloody Sunday” in January 1905 hundreds of workers who had gathered to petition for better conditions and modest political reforms were shot down outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, opening a year of revolutionary protest and strikes. The era’s passionate political life forced writers and artists to confront anew how their art related to politics at home. Some joined the fray with striking works of political satire; others retreated to rarified aesthetics. Young rebellious writers under Maxim Gorky’s lead captivated the public with neo-Realism. Visual artists embraced experimentation; they and a group of writers took up aesthetic Modernism under the twin banners of Symbolism and Decadence. Innovations in music and dance – notably the Ballets Russes – found admirers at home and abroad. Avant-garde artists embraced humor and publicity, in the process introducing Russia to a new melding of art and celebrity.

Chapter 1, “Horizons,” recovers the vanquished plan that preceded Milton Keynes, North Bucks New City. In the early 1960s, Buckinghamshire county council’s chief architect and planner, Fred Pooley, peered into the future. Like other planners at the time, he foresaw a post-industrial world of affluence, leisure, and new mobilities, if also one still organized around familiar gender roles and urban forms. Pooley designed a city for a quarter-million residents, with a monorail ensuring free and equal access to the city center. This social democratic vision sought to use the powers of the state to distribute the benefits of affluence. Pooley also wanted North Bucks New City to send a message to the world, expressing a nationalist urbanism that promised to secure Britain’s post-imperial status as an urban innovator. While the new town that eventually emerged, in the form of Milton Keynes, rejected Pooley’s monorail, its location – indeed, its existence – resulted from a contested process that cannot be understood without attending to this unrealized vision.

Chapter 2, “Planning,” examines a consequential moment in urban history, after Jane Jacobs but before OPEC. The question of the future city animated the 1967 competition to plan the most significant project in the world’s leading new towns program, Milton Keynes. Yet the plan that resulted attracted criticism for its banality, and so this chapter recovers the ideas that motivated the city’s planning in order to re-enchant The Plan for Milton Keynes (1970). The story features three characters: the chairman, Jock Campbell, a sixth-generation sugar magnate whose anti-communist campaigns in British Guiana left him wary of grand designs; the planner, Richard Llewelyn-Davies, a welfare state architect-planner whose plan for Milton Keynes propelled him into a thriving global practice; and the visionary, Melvin Webber, an American urban futurist who paradoxically persuaded the new town’s makers that the future could not be known. Together with their colleagues, these figures dared to reimagine both the city and the future, but their refusal of bold designs left a void which eventually became filled by roundabouts and concrete cows.