A collection of highlights from Mary Ann Caws’s long, highly distinguished career writing about literature, art, and modernism.
 
Throughout her long, highly distinguished career writing about literature and art, Mary Ann Caws has excavated, illuminated, and examined in depth the most intriguing works and personalities of Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, and beyond. In these concise, but always colorful and insightful articles, Caws brings us fresh portraits of the most famous figures and introduces us to the writers and artists who merit more attention than they’ve received, with a special focus on female writers and artists. The author’s sensitivity to the intersections of eccentric literature and eccentric life infuses each critical essay with the human passions that these essential modernists lived. From Dickinson and Mallarmé to Duchamp and Mina Loy, Caws applies the art of close looking to shrewdly framed slices of the modernist experience.

Mary Ann Caws is distinguished professor emerita of comparative literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is an Officer in the Palmes Académiques, a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of many books, including Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism and Mina Loy: Apology of Genius, both also published by Reaktion Books.