The first anthology of its kind, Manifesto features over two hundred artistic and cultural manifestos from a wide range of countries. The manifesto, a public statement that sets forth the tenets of a forthcoming, existing, or potential movement or "ism"—or that plays on the idea of one—became in various modernisms a crucial and forceful vehicle for artists, writers, and other intellectuals to express their ideas about the direction of aesthetics and society.

Included in this collection are texts ranging from Kurt Schwitters's Cow Manifesto to those written in the name of well-known movements—imagism, cubism, surrealism, symbolism, vorticism, projectivism—and less well-known ones—lettrism, acmeism, concretism, rayonism. Also covered are expressionist, Dada, and futurist movements from French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Latin American perspectives, as well as local movements, such as Brazilian hallucinism.

Influential, startling, unsettling, amusing, and continually engaging, these modernist manifestos give voice to a fascinating array of ideas and opinions that will prove invaluable to scholars and students of nineteenth and twentieth-century art, literature, and culture.

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author, editor, or translator of over forty books, including The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter and The Surrealist Painters and Poets.

"Librarians of the world, listen: your collections are incomplete without Manifesto! . . .Everyone who likes to think must have access to this big book, which will provide a lifetime of information and happy browsing."—Choice

"[Manifesto] gathers together the glorious, the histrionic and the just plain nutty pronouncements made by various artists and loudmouths at the outbreak of modernism. It is at once a fascinating thread running into that visionary labyrinth, an inspiring reminder of one of the great, weird moments in human history, and a sobering monument to a future that never arrived. . . . [Caws] has gathered every aesthetic ‘ism’ in the 20th century, from the familiar to the delightfully obscure. . . .The greatest pleasure in reading Manifesto is finding the unexpected prize—and there are many, some of them Cracker Jack toys, some diamonds."—Salon

"The perfect companion to the two-volume, international, 20th-century poetry anthology Poems for the Millennium, and . . . in some ways a more immediate and satisfying portrait of modernist poetics and modernism."—Publishers Weekly

"Manifesto pulsates with that special eureka! euphoria of those who believe they’ve located the right path to the future."—Village Voice