Drawing on recent feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, Cinzia Sartini Blum provides the first analysis of the rhetoric, politics, and psychology of gender in the avant-garde writings of the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti. Her book explores the relations between the seemingly unrelated goals of Italian Futurism: technical revolution, espousal of violence, avowed misogyny, and rejection of literary tradition.

Blum argues for the centrality of the rhetoric of gender in Marinetti's work. She also investigates a diverse array of his futurist textual practices that range from formal experimentation with "words in freedom" to nationalist manifestos that advocate intervention in World War I and anticipate subsequent fascist rhetoric of power and virility. A major contribution to the study of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the first full-length study of Marinetti in English, The Other Modernism will interest all those concerned with twentieth-century literature, culture, and society and the problem of modern subjectivity.

Cinzia Sartini Blum is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Iowa.

"A new approach from recent feminist and psychoanalytic criticism about Marinetti’s rhetoric, politics, and psychology of gender in his writings. . . . This is the first full-length study of Marinetti in English and should be of great interest to artists, writers, sociological and cultural critics."—Umbrella

"Blum discusses Marinetti’s provocative writings. . . . She provides a detailed analysis of Mafarka, le futuriste [and] Marinetti’s ‘African novel.’ . . . Blum’s solid discursive analysis is well worth reading. Popular feminist themes are treated as relevant literary questions to be explored in the critical setting of superomismo."—Choice