Mary Ann Caws

The first anthology of its kind, Manifesto features over two hundred artistic and cultural manifestos from a wide range of countries. The manifesto, a public statement that sets forth the tenets of a forthcoming, existing, or potential movement or "ism"--or that plays on the idea of one--became in various modernisms a crucial and forceful vehicle for artists, writers, and other intellectuals to express their ideas about the direction of aesthetics and society. Included in this collection are texts ranging from Kurt Schwitters's Cow Manifesto to those written in the name of well-known movements--imagism, cubism, surrealism, symbolism, vorticism, projectivism--and less well-known ones--lettrism, acmeism, concretism, rayonism. Also covered are expressionist, Dada, and futurist movements from French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Latin American perspectives, as well as local movements, such as Brazilian hallucinism. Influential, startling, unsettling, amusing, and continually engaging, these modernist manifestos give voice to a fascinating array of ideas and opinions that will prove invaluable to scholars and students of nineteenth and twentieth-century art, literature, and culture.… (more)

I'd give the pictures (which are a huge part of the book) five stars, but the text itself is pretty slight and doesn't give you a very cohesive look at Woolf's life. The author is obviously well-informed and has written several books on Bloomsbury folks, but here that translates into asides and shortcuts that give Woolf and her writing the short end of the stick. She also has some odd turns of phrase, particularly when describing mental illness and sexual abuse, that don't do the narrative any favors. The book itself is nicely printed with lots of space devoted to the often rare photographs of Woolf, her family, and her friends. Maybe just look at the pictures and enjoy the captions for this one, but go elsewhere for your Virginia Woolf insights.… (more)