This new collection updates, integrates, and contextualizes Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard examines responses of modernist writers, artists, and philosophers to a changed sense of reality and human nature. With its combination of previously published and new essays and its perspective on the theoretical avant-garde-modernism debate in the U.S., the volume provides the specialist and the general reader insight into European scholarly discourse on this hotly debated subject.