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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2011
Modernism and everything modern have always been identified with the avant-garde. If something had not at a certain juncture in cultural history been avant-garde, eo ipso it had also not been modern. But the history of literary Modernism shows a more complex picture. The various arrière-garde movements celebrating the regional, the traditional, the anti-urban aspects of life stood, on the one hand, in manifest contrast to the metropolitan and globally oriented Modernism, but were on the other hand also fostered by the same modernist wave from ca. 1850 onwards. I here discuss the dichotomies between the local and the global, and between the avant- and arrière-garde as constitutive of Modernism as a whole from its very beginnings.