Apparitions of the Universal in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art

Should literature and art aspire to universality? Today, universal ideals are often criticized for the exclusions they conceal. Yet across the twentieth century, diverse forms of universalism animated both artistic practice and the institutions through which it circulated. In Apparitions of the Universal in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art, Nico Israel offers a striking reinterpretation of modernism by tracing how literature and art engage with—and unsettle—the history and rhetoric of universalism. Focusing on institutions that operationalized universalist claims, from Esperanto and the Nobel Prize to the United Nations and the insurance industry, Israel reads canonical figures such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, and Fernand Léger alongside less frequently discussed artists and writers including Evgeny Vuchetich, Odinigwe (Ben) Enwonwu, and Pearl S. Buck. Universalism, he argues, is neither inherently progressive nor reactionary but an inescapable aesthetic and political problem. By revealing the surprising forms universalism assumed across the twentieth century, this book decisively reorients debates about modernism and global form.