Contemporary revolutions : turning back to the future in 21st-century literature and art / edited by Susan Stanford Friedman.

Contributions to a panel on "Revolving Modernisms, Recycling Revolutions" held at the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Boston. The conference's unifying theme was Revolution, a gesture toward the city as a birthplace of the American Revolution. The panel grew out of the recognition of contradictory meanings hidden in the etymology of the word revolution. Revolution originally meant a turning back, a rotation back to move forward, as in the cycle of the planets; later, revolution came to mean radical overthrow, rupture, change, particularly of political systems and the social order.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"An exploration of how 21st-century writers, artists, and performers forge a new concept of contemporaneity, this book shows how their work re-purposes fiction, poetry, and paintings of the past. Returning to revolution's original meaning of 'cycle', Contemporary Revolutions examines how African, European, and Middle Eastern literature and the arts addresses the violence and inequities of the present. Friedman brings together essays on a broad range of artists and topics: artists including Kabe Wilson, fabric artist Ellen Bell, graphic designer Sana Yazigi; writers such as W. G. Sebald and poet Selina Tusitala Marsh and their reworking of authors Virginia Woolf and Albert Wendt; and traumatic occurrences from Nazism to the Syrian Revolution -- Provided by publisher.