Umberto Boccioni

Italian Futurist Theatre provides an overview of the theatrical activities of the Italian Futurist movement, headed by F. T. Marinetti. It analyses the theory and practice of Futurist performance, covers the theatre work of all leading artists and writers of the movement, and discusses the principal aims and achievements of their theatrical experiments. The main focus of the study is directed towards reconstructing the performance history of Futurist theatre. But it also incorporates aspects of dramatic writing, stage and costume design and theatre architecture, and is heavily illustrated. Although the significance of Futurism for the art and culture of this century is universally acknowledged today, relatively little research has been undertaken with regard to the form of expression that was dearest to the Futurists: theatre. No other art could better demonstrate the movement's concept of 'art as action', propagate its anti-traditionalist stance and demonstrate its modernist aims and aesthetics. Yet the myriads of Futurist experiments in the performing arts have been neglected by scholars, partly because documentation is not easily available, partly because of the inherent problems of reconstructing performances of the past. This volume is the first comprehensive study of Italian Futurist theatre in the English language. It is the result of a major research project, supported by the British Academy, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. This highly original book is predominantly based on documents discovered in the course of ten years of extensive investigations in Italian archives, libraries, and private collections.

D.H. Lawrence, asserts Jack Stewart, expresses a painter's vision in words, supplementing visual images with verbal rhythms. With the help of twenty-three illustrations, Stewart shows how Lawrence's style relates to impressionism, expressionism, primitivism, and futurism.

Stewart examines Lawrence's painterly vision in The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent. While many critics find Georgian pastoralism in The White Peacock, Stewart finds the influence of modernist aesthetics, from Beardsley's erotic drawings to the case of urban impressionism Lawrence draws upon in the London scenes. Critics stress Lawrence's master realism in Sons and Lovers, but as Stewart demonstrates, that realism is increasingly supplemented by impressionism, symbolism, and even expressionism. In that novel, Lawrence presents reality through an objective style that interacts with subjective modes to sustain an expressive image of life. In The Rainbow, Lawrence advances beyond realism to a new style that, with violent projections of "soul-states" and distortions of natural imagery, parallels expressionism in the visual arts. Stewart also explores three art movements in Women in Love: expressionism, primitivism, and futurism.

The final three chapters deal with the influence exerted on Lawrence's fiction by the work of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, and the Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. Stewart concludes by synthesizing the themes that pervade this interarts study: vision and expression, art and ontology.