Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism collects, updates, integrates and contextualizes the critic Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard's topic in all of these essays is the modernist writers', artists', and philosophers' linguistic and visual responses to a changed sense of reality and human nature. Beginning with an overview of the problematics of European modernism, Sheppard establishes the dialectical relationship between the cultural crisis that occurred during the period 1880-1936 and the different responses from European modernists and the avant-garde. With its combination of classic and new essays and its perspective on the theoretical avant-garde/modernism debate in the United States, Sheppard's volume should give the specialist as well as the general reader an insight into the highest sample of European scholarly discourse on this subject.