An immensely enjoyable feat of cultural beachcombing, fresh, diverse and enlightening.’
John Carey

‘A fascinating take on the wave of the avant-garde breaking on British shores’.
J.B. Bullen

Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside

Edited by Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris. Peter Lang, 2009

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Art and Culture at the British Seaside

Edited by Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris. Peter Lang, 2009 

Modernism on Sea brings together writing by some of today’s most exciting seaside critics, curators, filmmakers and scholars, and takes the reader on a journey around the coast of Britain to explore the rich artistic and cultural heritage that can be found there. It puts the case for a new geography of avant-gardism, acknowledging that the most intriguing cultural hubs of modern times include Swanage, Margate, Morecambe and Hythe.

Essays by: Michael Bracewell, David Bradshaw, Lara Feigel, Fred Gray, Alexandra Harris, Edwina Keown, Andrew Kötting, William May, Nicola Moorby, Ben Morgan, Deborah Parsons, Bruce Peter & Philip Dawson, Alan Powers, Paul Rennie, Frances Spalding, Svetlin Stratiev.

 From the LRB Bookshop:

Modernism on Sea is a compilation of serious scholarly essays disguised in red and white beach stripes. These essays include studies on the importance of the port and the ocean liner to the English avant-garde, the sea’s influence on form in Sylvia Plath, the High Modernist architecture of Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr pavilion, and David Bradshaw writing about Virginia Woolf. The book benefits from editors Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris’s capacious definition of ‘Modernism’, which encompasses most of the 20th century. Modernism on Sea encourages consideration of the changing, marginal space where sea and land meet, places which ‘look like nobody had ever been there before just dunes and sand and sea and nobody at all.’ (Stevie Smith)

From the Oxford Art Journal:

‘Readable and thought-provoking… a stimulating and wide-ranging collection.’