A Political Economy of Modernism - Literature, Post-Classical Economics, and the Lower Middle-Class

In A Political Economy of Modernism, Ronald Schleifer examines the political economy of what he calls 'the culture of modernism' by focusing on literature and the arts; intellectual disciplines of post-classical economics; and institutional structures of corporate capitalism and the lower middle-class. In its wide ranging study focused on modernist writers (Dreiser, Hardy, Joyce, Stevens, Woolf, Wells, Wharton, Yeats), modernist artists (Cézanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg), economists (Jevons, Marshall, Veblen), and philosophers (Benjamin, Jakobson, Russell), this book presents an institutional history of cultural modernism in relation to the intellectual history of Enlightenment ethos and the social history of the second Industrial Revolution. It articulates a new method of analysis of the early twentieth century - configuration and modeling - that reveals close connections among its arts, understandings, and social organizations"-- Provided by publisher. "In the Methodological Prologue to this book, I mention that Political Economy of Modernism takes its place in relation to my earlier books, Modernism and Time, which examined cultural modernism in relation to intellectual institutions of the sciences, mathematics, and aesthetics in the early twentieth century; and Modernism and Popular Music, which examined cultural modernism in relation to the articular social-aesthetic institutions - the experience - new popular musical forms conditioned by the remarkable technological innovations related to institutions of experience: recorded music, the radio, widening opportunities for large numbers of people to encounter music of all forms, which arose in the early twentieth century. Political Economy of Modernism similarly focuses on social - rather than ntellectual or experiential - institutions by which we can grasp the nature of modernism. In my mind, these three books together attempt to encompass "The Culture of Modernism" in relation to institutions of forms of knowledge, experience, and social relations. Still, this volume, like the preceding books, does not assume that these books need to be read together. Here, there are a modest number of cross references, but all three of these books focus dependently,from their different vantages, on "modernist" knowledge, experience, and social organization"-- Provided by publisher. Machine generated contents note: 1. Methodological prologue: the constellation of modernism; Part I. Economics in the Context of Cultural Modernism: 2. The argument; 3. Modernism and economics: the long history and immediate history of modernism; Part II. Intangible Assets: Modernist Economics: 4. The origins of corporate influences parts: technological innovations, intangible assets, and the shapes of aesthetic experience; 5. Modernist goods, modernists arts: consumption and commodities in the new twentieth century; Interlude: from economics to discourse:economic fact, semiotic fact; Part III. Intangible Liabilities: Class and Value in the Time of Modernism: 6. The lower middle-class: literature, economics, and the shape of modernism; 7. Political economy and the fictions of finance: the modernism of Dreiser and Wells; Conclusion: cosmopolitan modernism..