Ambient Avant-Gardes in Sophie Seita’s Provisional Avant-Gardes

Abstract

Sophie Sieta has filled an important gap in scholarship surrounding both theories of the avant-garde and material textual studies with her first monograph, Provisional Avant-Gardes (2019). From ‘Dada to Digital’, Sieta navigates a ‘diachronic’ investigation of the relationship between avant-garde literary communities and the print formats in which they have often published their work. In doing so, she expands the historical range within which considerations of the avant-garde and little magazines are usually framed (the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines ends in the 1960s) and intersects both areas of study with the digital turn. Sieta thus offers a fascinating and dynamic discussion of the relationship between expressive, formal innovation and the material text, which illuminates this issue’s theme of ‘ambience’. Rigorously engaging with the entanglement and the permeability of boundaries between text, form, and self-definition, this study places increasingly ripe and timely elements of ambient literature towards the forefront of modern and contemporary literary studies’ concerns.