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

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction.  Chapter 1. Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature, and Music.- Part I. Retrospection and Memory. Chapter 2. Stepping in the Same River Twice: Péter Forgács and the Revisiting of The Danube Exodus.- Chapter 3. Uwe Timm and the Ghosts of the Past: a Writer’s Ethical Impact on the Agenda of Collective Memory.- Chapter 4. Australia and Morocco Revisited: The Materialized Travel Memories of Dutch Visual Artist Theo Kuijpers.- Part II. Revision, Politics, and Ideology. Chapter 5. The Fall and Rise of Exile’s Return: Malcolm Cowley and the Cultural Politics of Revision.- Chapter 6. Revision, Change, and the Native American Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine(s).- Chapter 7. An Old Man Looking from the Window: Camille Pissarro, the Tuileries Garden Paintings and Turning Points in his Career.- Part III. Revisiting and Control: the Artist’s Legacy. Chapter 8. Retrospective Anticipation: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Efforts at Controlling her Legacy.- Chapter 9. Replaying the Past: Belgian Pop Band dEUS’s Return to Early Work.- Chapter 10. Confessin’ the Blues: The Rolling Stones’ Revisit of their Musical Roots.- Chapter 11. Artists’ Haunts: Late Artists Revisiting their Work Beyond their Time.- Part IV.Transformation and Change in Late Work. Chapter 12. Space, Time, and Change in Claude Monet’s Late Paintings.- Chapter 13. Winter is Coming: The Voice of Spring by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1910).

About the Author :
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.