Modernism, Aesthetics and Anthropology

Argues that a combination of aesthetics and anthropology allowed modernist writers to challenge nineteenth century social hierarchies.

John Hoffmann shows that Enlightenment theorists synthesized aesthetics and anthropology in an effort to reconcile social unity with the diversity of human forms. Writers in the twentieth century then took up that synthesis in order to reject social hierarchies, which had been legitimized by nineteenth century anthropology.John Hoffmann argues that a combination of aesthetics and anthropology allowed modernist writers to challenge social hierarchies they associated with the nineteenth century. He shows how Enlightenment philosophers synthesized the two discourses and how modernists working in the early twentieth century then took up this synthesis to dispute categories of social difference that had been naturalized, and thus legitimized, by pre-evolutionary and Darwinian anthropological theories. The book brings a range of new insights to major topics in modernist studies, revealing neglected continental sources for Irish anti-colonialism, the aesthetic contours of Zionism in the era of Mandatory Palestine, and the influence of German idealism on critiques of racism following World War I. Working over a long historical durée, Hoffmann surveys the ways aesthetics has been used, and misused, to construct and contest social hierarchies grounded in anthropological distinctions.