Convinced that all aspects of modern culture have been affected by avant-garde art, Renato Poggioli explores the relationship between the avant-garde and civilization. Historical parallels and modern examples from all the arts are used to show how the avant-garde is both symptom and cause of many major extra-aesthetic trends of our time, and that the contemporary avant-garde is the sole and authentic one.

• CONTENTS 
• 1. 
• THE CONCEPT OF THE AVANT-GARDE
• Prologue
• Terminological ups-and-downs
• The two avant-gardes
• A novel concept, a novel fact
• 2. 
• THE CONCEPT OF A MOVEMENT
• Schools and movements
• The dialectic of movements
• Activism
• Antagonism
• 3. 
• ROMANTICISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE
• Popularity and unpopularity
• Romanticism as a precedent
• Down-with-the-past
• Anticipations
• 4. 
• AGONISM AND FUTURISM
• Nihilism
• Agonism
• Futurism
• Decadence
• 5. 
• FASHION, TASTE, AND THE PUBLIC
• Fashion, avant-garde, and stereotype
• Intelligentsia and elite
• The intellectual elite
• The avant-garde and politics
• 6. 
• THE STATE OF ALIENATION
• Art and society
• Psychological and social alienation
• Economic and cultural alienation
• Stylistic and aesthetic alienation
• 7. 
• TECHNOLOGY AND THE AVANT-GARDE
• Experimentalism
• Scientificism
• Humorism
• Nominalistic proof
• 8. 
• AVANT-GARDE CRITICISM
• Prerequisites
• The problem of obscurity
• Judgment and prejudgment
• Criticism, right and left
• 9. 
• AESTHETICS AND POETICS
• Dehumanization
• Cerebralism and voluntarism
• Metaphysics of the metaphor
• The mystique of purity
• 10. 
• HISTORY AND THEORY
• Historical parallels
• Modernity and modernism
• The overcoming of the avant-garde
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index