Introduction

In his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) Peter Bürger sets himself the taskof producing a definition of the progressive artistic movements of the early twentieth century that will both distinguish them from earlier avant-garde phenomena as well as from other contemporary artistic movements of the modernist period such as aestheticism. Although Bürger's model offers what purports to be a general definition of the historical avant-garde it is clear that for the most part his theoretical descriptions and analyses are oriented specifically towards dada and surrealism, his examples being drawn almost exclusively from these movements and in particular from the plastic arts rather than from literary texts. Notably absent from Bürger's analysis of the movements of the avant-garde, for example, is one of the seminal phenomena of early twentieth-century literature, film and art, namely German expressionism. Bürger adds a suggestive note to the effect that one might, within certain limitations, discover a number of essential avant-garde features in expressionism, such as its critique of the institutionalized character of art and its characteristic rejection not simply of previous movements but of the tradition of art in its entirety.