Anarchy and Art

Reveals how major Euro-American writers from the late 18th to mid-20th century engaged with anarchist thought, revealing anarchism as a significant yet overlooked force shaping Western literary modernity.

• Anarchy and Art: Literary, Visual and Political Cultures from 18th to 20th Centuries is a comparative research on Euro-American literary history that seeks to integrate political discourse into literary theory. What is the relationship between Western literature and the politics of dissent? How does the 19th-century novel respond to the anarchist Propaganda of the deed? How do poetry and theatre respond? These and other issues are at the heart of this research, which attempts to analyze the literary and figurative representation of anarchism and the character of the anarchist between the 18th and 20th centuries.

• The volume speaks of plural anarchisms to take account of the semantic polyvalence with which this specific doctrine is approached here. Tracing the fluctuating fortunes of the concept—from condemnation to exaltation—it explores how anarchy has been deployed as a metaphor for both cultural collapse and artistic genesis. From Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot to the Italian theory of Gianni Vattimo and Giorgio Agamben, the term has been used as a symbol of aesthetic innovation and philosophical critique, echoing the Bakuninian notion of the “creative revolution.” The aim of the research is to analyze the biases with which literature, and its audience, have approached anarchist doctrine and, at the same time, the aesthetic representation they have given it.

• The book is organized into two sections. The first Tempo, “Anarchist Literature and Its 18th Century Origins,” revolves around the relationship between literature and the rise of anarchist doctrine. The second Tempo, “Literature and Anarchism in 19th and early 20th Centuries,” revolves around how literary genres interact with anarchism, often favoring long-lasting forms of experimentalism.

• At the end of the volume, two appendixes extend the research to visual studies. Appendix I: “Visual Cultures and the Image of the Anarchist between the Fin de Siècle and the Early 20th Century” studies the representation of anarchist-type and the revolutionary-type across newspapers, caricatures, portraits, and mass culture. It analyzes the visual construction of the “enemy,” or the “outcast,” from Belle Époque to Modernism, beginning with physiognomic studies and Cesare Lombroso’s essay Gli anarchici (1894). Appendix I aims to situate anarchist imagery within a broader critical discourse on cultural representation and ideological encoding.

• Finally, in the light of visual theory, Appendix II: “Art and Anarchy. From the Verbal to the Visual: Edgar Wind, Pupil of Aby Warburg” explores the relationship between anarchism and visual culture as well as Warburg’s legacy and influence on Edgar Wind’s notorious essay Art and Anarchy (1963). This writing, with its swirling comparative aspiration, constitutes the necessary comparison of the manuscript, and it helps to reconstruct the post-20th-century reception of the dyad art and/vs. anarchy.