The essence of Modernism - the aesthetic and intellectual movement that virtually reinvented art and literature at the turn of the twentieth century - is the thrust of the latest volume from Daniel R. Schwarz. In Reconfiguring Modernism, Schwarz suggests diverse directions for studying the relationship between modern art and modern literature.

Bringing together thirty years of experience on the subject and drawing upon specific texts and paintings, Schwarz proposes interrelationships between such striking pairs of artists as Gauguin and Joseph Conrad, Manet and Henry James, and Cezanne and T. S. Eliot, as well as a triptych consisting of Picasso, Stevens, and Joyce. He focuses on the high Modernist period from 1890 to 1940 and examines the way in which we "read" paintings as narrative.

Reconfiguring Modernism provocatively discusses the reading of intertextual relationships between modern painters and modern authors, and sheds new light on the influence of African, Asian, and Pacific cultures on European Modernism.