The Absolute Motion Detector

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

Notes on Contributors

Modern agriculture, which underwent revolutionary progress to achieve its twentieth-century form, can be defined in a single phrase as “petroleumdependent agriculture”. Inexpensive fossil fuels are used to operate large machinery, which enables large-scale cultivation, mono-cropping, standardization and high-volume transport; and the synthesis of fertilizers and agricultural chemicals permits the improvement of soil fertility and simplified management of ecosystems. Until the nineteenth century, agriculturalists were basically forced to engage in stable sustainable agriculture that took maximum advantage of nature’s functions. But during the twentieth century, by taking full advantage of the energy sources provided by inexpensive fossil fuels, “using natural functions” gave way to “applying technology to transform nature”. This form of agriculture is referred to as the modern agricultural revolution because its basic technologies were established at the start of the twentieth century, permitting a great leap in production. The modern agricultural revolution is characterized by (1) the mechanization and increased scale of agriculture, with high-volume transport made possible by motorization using fossil fuels (petroleum) to power internal combustion engines; (2) the management of soil fertility and ecology using chemical fertilizers and agricultural chemicals; (3) the development of high-yield varieties; (4) advanced water management in some regions; and (5) remarkable increases in labour productivity as a result of the first four characteristics. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the basic technologies for motorization through the use of gasoline to power internal combustion engines were established. Also, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed the technology to produce ammonia by fixing atmospheric nitrogen gas. The Haber–Bosch process is a method of producing ammonia using an iron oxide catalyst to trigger a reaction of nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas under supercritical conditions, 300–550°C and 15–25 MPa. Thanks to this process, it is now possible to manufacture the nitrogen fertilizers that play a crucial role in agriculture. In this way, the fundamental technologies for modern agriculture were almost entirely established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One more important factor in the development of petroleum-dependent agriculture was crop yield improvement technologies based on large-scale fertilization and the breeding of extremely highyielding varieties. These varieties included Norin 10 wheat and Yukara rice, which were bred by Japan in the 1950s and successfully contributed to heavier yields of tropical wheat and rice, an event called the Green Revolution.

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Reviewed by: History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century Maureen Konkle (bio) History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. By Steven Conn. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 276. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00.) Steven Conn's book serves as an overview of the disciplining of Native peoples in the nineteenth-century United States: he describes how, by the close of the century, knowledge about Native peoples had been confined to anthropology, and Native peoples themselves confined to realm [End Page 518] of culture and excluded from history. His narrative account of the movement of knowledge about Indians from the missionaries, travelers, and government officials who produced it in the late eighteenth century to the certified university-ensconced anthropologists who took hold of it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is especially useful. But his interpretation of the material falls flat, betraying his lack of expertise in Native history. It's common in literary studies for a scholar to write a book about Indians without sustained experience in the field, less so in history. Conn so scrupulously limits his analysis on the one hand, and rests his arguments on mistaken assumptions about Native history on the other, that the book becomes less than the sum of its parts. Conn freely admits that he is "no historian of Native America," and that his book is not about the representation of Indians. It is rather, he writes, an intellectual history of those who studied Indians that, he insists, can reveal how that study "shaped the American mind" and more particularly "[defined] American science and social science, and "shaped conceptions of the nation's history" (5). He makes three principal claims: that Native peoples "posed fundamental challenges to the way EuroAmericans understood the world"; that the emergence of natural science rather than the Bible as an explanation for the existence of Native peoples "shaped the transition from a sacred world view to a secular one"; and that the necessity of explaining the existence of Native peoples influenced the changing definitions of history itself (5). Thus, Conn is interested in history as a discipline rather than the history of Native peoples in the United States. He surmises that "intellectual encounters" with Native peoples caused EuroAmericans to separate history from myth and from culture and also "from the realm of the past" (6). Over the nineteenth century, Conn argues, EuroAmericans excluded Native peoples from history itself. The book includes an introductory chapter on images of Indians in nineteenth-century art as exemplifying the transformation of Native peoples from historical figures to representative manifestations of cultures; subsequent chapters on the study of Native languages, archaeology, and anthropology; and a concluding chapter on Native peoples and U.S. historiography in the era. The most fundamental problem with the book is Conn's insistence that history as a discipline and the history of Native-EuroAmerican relations can be separated such that those "intellectual encounters" have little or nothing to do with political relations. Historians in this book are sincere if ethnocentric people who try very hard to understand Indians; [End Page 519] the possibility that they might be part of a larger system of thinking about and managing Native peoples, justifying and maintaining white authority, receives little or no attention. This absence of attention to the politics of knowledge might explain—at least in part—Conn's simply wrong assertion that Native peoples are gradually removed from history over the course of the nineteenth century. Conn observes that in the early nineteenth century, EuroAmerican writers like James Fenimore Cooper "included" Indians in their historical accounts of America, but with the emergence of professional historians of the United States like George Bancroft in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Indians began to be shifted out of U.S. history into ethnology and then anthropology. Conn argues that this "inclusion" of Native peoples in the history of the United States is in itself evidence of the historicizing of Indians, and thus Cooper's last of the Mohicans can be said to be a historical Indian, since Cooper used John Heckewelder's work to describe his...

Symposium Beyond Habermas: Text and ·Performance in the Making of·the "Public" in Late Qing and Republican China* Introduction* by Michael Tsin The term "public," or gong, has a venerable history in the Chinese political lexicon. From its origins in the classical texts, it has always carried the connotation of representing, in opposition to the realm of the personal (si), the interests of the collective. Just what exactly comprisedthecollectivewas,·.of course, subject to variations in context and changes in time and place. Prior to the latter part of the Qing, it was usually segments of the .literati elites who arrogated to themselves the role as the articulated voice of this elusive public. As with most aspects of everyday life in the late Qing, however, this traditional elite claim to be the arbiter of "public opinion" (gonglun) was confronted with significant challenges by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The quest for new forms of political and social organization was accompanied by an intensive process of reconfiguring the notion of the "public" in China; it is a shared interest in exploring the histories of that important process that has resulted in this symposium. Unlike earlier scholars who examined the issue through the prism of the development ofa civil·society or JiirgenHabermas' s concept of a "public sphere" of reason and rationality, the three authors here address the reconfiguration of the "public" withinthe context of the transformations in print and media technology, the forging of new avenues for the enhanced circulation -and consumption-of written texts and visual images, and the ways in which the process of reconfiguration mediated between the.(re)-articulation of social/moral norms and values and the logic of an expanding consumer economy. Their findings and arguments have important implications for our understanding of twentieth-century Chinese history and beyond. * The papers in this symposium were originally presented in a panel entitled "Politics and Culture of the 'Public' in Late Imperial and Republican China," held on 18 January 2003 at the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies held at Jekyll Island, Georgia. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 29, No.2 (April, 2004): 1-5 2 Twentieth-Century China Paize Keulemans' s study of the popularization of martial arts novels in the late Qing sets the stage for this process of reconfiguring the public. From their earlier incarnation as a form of art and entertainment that presupposed close and intimate interaction between the lone storyteller and the audience, these martial arts stories appeared increasingly in printed form by the latter part of the nineteenth century to cater to the need of a growing "middlebrow" Beijing audience . From there the marketing of these tales of knights-errant, moral integrity, and heroism spread to other parts of the empire, appropriated, as it were, by bannermen and Jiangnan literati alike for their own purposes. But it was the use of new printing technologies-lithography and metal type-that truly transformed the reach of these novels by the early twentieth century, enlarging the circulation and creating a new "reading public" in the process. By then the figure of the storyteller had been all but forgotten, yet the central motifs of these stories -heroic struggles and moral righteousness-were to endure as an integral part of the cultural repertoire of the newly reconfigured public, symbolized by the ever increasing number of urban consumers of these novels, in twentiethcentury China. Both Jan Kiely's article on the Communist hunger strikers and Eugenia Lean's essay on the fascinating case of the avenging assassin Shi Jianqiao demonstrate clearly the significance of these cultural motifs both in imagining and in the imagination of the new public. In their performance for the imagined public, both the Communist partisans and Shi Jianqiao made astute use of moral norms and values-justice, loyalty, integrity-to anchor their narratives and images for delivery to their potential audience. Just as Sheryl Kroen finds in her work on restoration France in the nineteenth century, these two articles together well illustrate the twin phenomena of "politics as theater" and "theater as politics"-to use Kroen's terms-in Republican China. 1 In his discussion of the resistance of Communist prisoners as a...

Since the early twentieth century, the amplitudes of tidal constituents in the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy display clear secular trends that are among the largest anywhere observed for a regional body of water. The M2 amplitude at Eastport, Maine, increased at a rate of 14.1 ± 1.2 cm per century until it temporarily dropped during 1980–1990, apparently in response to changes in the wider North Atlantic. Annual tidal analyses indicate M2 reached an all‐time high amplitude last year (2018). Here we report new estimates of tides derived from nineteenth century water‐level measurements found in the U.S. National Archives. Results from Eastport, Portland, and Pulpit Harbor (tied to Bar Harbor) do not follow the twentieth century trends and indicate that the Gulf of Maine tide changes commenced sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, coincident with a transition to modern rates of sea‐level rise as observed at Boston and Portland. General agreement is that sea level rise alone is insufficient to cause the twentieth‐century tide changes. A role for ocean stratification is suggested by the long‐term warming of Gulf of Maine waters; archival water temperatures at Boston, Portland, and Eastport show increases of ∼2 °C since the 1880s. In addition, a changing seasonal dependence in M2 amplitudes is reflected in a changing seasonal dependence in water temperatures. The observations suggest that models seeking to reproduce Gulf of Maine tides must consider both sea level rise and long‐term changes in stratification.

The purpose of the article is to study and analyze the decorative and artistic features of designing rural housing in Naddniprianshchyna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centurу. The research methodology consisted in the set of basic principles: objectivity, historicism, systemicity, multifactorness, complexity, development and pluralism; to fulfill the research purpose, the following methods of scientific knowledge were used: problem-chronological, concrete-historical, statistical, descriptive, and logical-analytical. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the art critical analysis of decorative and artistic features of designing rural housing in Naddniprianshchyna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the context of identifying traditional features of Ukrainian art modernism; the study of characteristic features of design, decoration and interior; the consideration of peculiarities of the internal subject environment of the modernist style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Conclusions. As a result of the art critical analysis of the decorative and artistic features of designing rural housing in Naddniprianshchyna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was discovered that the assimilation by Ukrainian culture - in particular, the domestic modernism – of the semantic principles of Western and Oriental art was the embodiment of a certain qualitative specificity of human relations with the world, which affected the peculiarities of the internal subject environment of the modernist style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The materializing tradition of the exterior and interior of the Ukrainian dwelling, with its locally-regional constructive and decorative-artistic features, becomes an embodiment of a distinctive artistic and aesthetic reality.

The fact that much of what the Japanese regard as part of their culture originally came to Japan from the Asian continent in ancient and medieval times is well known and has been extensively researched. For the period after 1868, however, the attention of scholars has tended to concentrate on Japan’s comprehensive importation of Western civilization. This exploratory article suggests a different perspective. Taking music in modern Japan as an example and based in part on the author’s research for her recent book Not by Love Alone: The Violin in Japan, 1850-2010, the author will argue that music is a particularly rewarding fi eld for examining transnational fl ows. Research on music in modern Japan has tended to privilege the introduction of European art music from the West and this was undoubtedly one of the most important developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are, however, aspects to this development that merit more attention than they have received so far, including the relationship between Western music and other musics practised in Japan in the nineteenth century and the interactions between Japan and non-Western countries and in particular its East Asian neighbours. In this article, four general themes for further enquiry are introduced: 1. The possible relation between Meiji statesmen’s and intellectuals’ kangaku education and their views on the role of music in the modern state. 2. The Chinese origins and the place of minshingaku (Ming and Qing music) in the musical culture of nineteenthcentury Japan. 3. Japan’s role in the dissemination of Western Music in East Asia. 4. The role of the East Asian continent (particularly the cities of Shanghai and Harbin) as a place of encounter between Asia and Europe.

1. Abstract Classical Geometry, as conceived by Euclid, was a plataform from which Mathematics started to build its actual form. However, since the XIX century, it was a language that was not evolving as the same pase as the others branches of Physics and Mathematics. In this way, analytic, non-Euclidean and projective geometries, matrix theory, vector calculus, complex numbers, rigid and conformal transformations, ordinary and partial differential equations, to name some, are different mathematical tools which are used nowadays to model and solve almost any problem in robotic vision, but the presence of the classical geometric theory in such solutions is only implicit. However, over the last four decades a new mathematical framework has been developed as a new lenguage where not only the classical geometry is included, but where many of these mathematical systems will be embedded too. Instead of using different notation and theory for each of those systems, we will simplify the whole study introducing the CGA, a unique mathematical framework where all those systems are embedded, gaining in principle clarity and simplicity. Moreover, incidence algebra operations as union and intersection of subspaces, are also included in this system through the meet and join operations. In this regard, CGA appears promising for dealing with kinematics, dynamics and projective geometric problems in one and only one mathematical framework. In this chapter we propose simulated and real tasks for perception-action systems, treated in a unify way and using only operations and geometrical entities of this algebra. We propose applications to follow geometric primitives or ruled sufaces with an arm’s robot for shape understanding and object manipulation, as well as applications in visual grasping. But we believe that the use of CGA can be of great advantage in visually guided robotics using stereo vision, range data, laser, omnidirectional or odometry based systems.

By combining digital humanities text-mining tools and a qualitative approach, we examine changing concepts in forestry journals in Sweden and the United States (US) in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Our first hypothesis is that foresters at the beginning of the twentieth century were more concerned with production and less concerned with ecology than foresters at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our second hypothesis is that US foresters in the early twentieth century were less concerned with local site conditions than Swedish foresters. We find that early foresters in both countries had broader—and often ecologically focused—concerns than hypothesized. Ecological concerns in the forestry literature have increased, but in the Nordic countries, production concerns have increased as well. In both regions and both time periods, timber management is closely connected to concerns about governance and state power, but the forms that governance takes have changed.

Notes on Contributors

During the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of research on the seaboard mortality associated with intercontinental migration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The focus of historical interest in this linkage between mortality and migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. We now have mortality rates on voyages from various regions in Africa to various destinations in the Americas, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see Curtin, 1968, 1969: 275-286; Klein and Engerman, 1976, 1979; Klein, 1978; Postma, 1979; Miller, 1981; Cohn and Jensen, 1982a, 1982b; Cohn, 1985; Eltis, 1984, 1987; Steckel and Jensen, 1986; Galenson, 1986). These slave studies have spawned renewed interest in the mortality associated with other seaborne populations, and mortality rates have been calculated on Dutch immigrant voyages to the East Indies during the eighteenth century, European convict and immigrant voyages to North America and European immigrant voyages to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Indian and Pacific Islander indentured labor voyages to Fiji and Queensland, Australia, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Riley, 1981; Eltis, 1983; Cohn, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988; Grubb, 1987; Ekirch, 1987; Morgan, 1985; Shlomowitz, 1986, 1987, 1989; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1988, forthcoming).

Two Newbery Medal Winners and the Feminine Mystique:Hitty, Her First Hundred Years and Miss Hickory* Lois R. Kuznets (bio) Through the decades the authors of Newbery and Caldecott books have consciously, and perhaps sometimes unconsciously, revealed the concerns, manners and attitudes of the society in which they lived. This is true not only of realistic fiction, but of other genres as well, especially historical fiction and fantasy. As a consequence the books are interesting as documents of social history as well as literature for children. (Peterson and Solt 10) In the mid-twentieth century, two doll stories won Newbery Medals seventeen years apart: Rachel Field's Hitty, Her First Hundred Years in 1930 and Carolyn Sherwin Bailey's Miss Hickory in 1947. As well as doll fantasy, the first text can be considered historical fiction in the form of a personal memoir of American experience through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the second, while also a doll fantasy, seems ahistorical—set in a universal, seasonal time in rural New England; it also partakes, to some extent, of the Robinsonade—the tale of survival in the wilderness. What follows in this essay should be dubbed feminist analysis: I examine the nature and tradition of doll stories in general while comparing these two doll narratives in terms of both form and cultural history, actively responding to what I read in each text. At the ChLA Conference in San Diego in 1990, Valerie Cretaux presented a paper entitled "Beyond Gender Role Model Stereotyping: The Fate of Girls and Dolls in Nineteenth-Century France." She demonstrated that what Victor Hugo's narrator in Les Misérables says about little girls' [End Page 1] treating dolls as models of future babies is not confirmed by what the text shows about little girls and dolls.1 Cosette, the child, first cuddles a sword, and then treats her gift doll as a mother figure and a powerful female role model in a struggle not to conform to the passive feminine and benignly maternal stereo-archetype that both Jean Valjean, the doll giver, and the narrator seem to posit. In the same paper, Cretaux demonstrates that another nineteenth-century writer, Sophie de Ségur (1799-1874), writing specifically for children in her Les Malheurs de Sophie, shows the girl child to have aggressively hostile feelings toward her doll, which here takes the baby role, only to be mutilated and destroyed beyond repair; dolly's demise is celebrated in a grand and joyous funeral. The mutilated doll lying in state and then buried gaily contrasts well, as Cretaux points out, with that archetypal image of female life-in-death and sexual resurrection: intact Snow White waiting in her glass coffin for the prince's kiss. In the mid-nineteenth century, Juliana Ewing's mother, Mrs. Alfred Gatty, published a doll memoir, Aunt Sally's Life, which depicts multiple unsentimental doll burials along with multiple mutilations, all in the life of one doll.2 And familiar doll scenes from nineteenth-century British books not specifically for children, Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss, like their French counterparts, depict the idiosyncratic ways in which girls and dolls interact. Abused Jane Eyre treats her doll as a consolatory object and pampers it as no one pampers Jane, but rebellious Maggie Tulliver alternately babies and abuses her doll. Even more clearly, Frances Hodgson Burnett, in her autobiography, The One I Knew the Best of All, shows what a rebellious and creative little female can do with a doll and a plot line. Her doll played the heroine roles in a number of dramas taken from received texts and Burnett's own imagination while Burnett herself played all the hero and villain roles. The doll certainly learned to conform to the image of the culturally approved female in literature; whether her young mistress did the same is questionable. So, as Naomi Lewis notes also in introducing The Silent Playmate, "the doll and child relationship is not as simple and crude as the nondoll-liker desires to think. Make no mistake—unless this happens to be the play of the moment . . . the child is not the parent of the doll...

Ukrainian culture from the second half of the nineteenth century. developed with such main features - the transformation of a purely cultural movement into a national liberation movement, the formation of similar features in the cultural-process processes with the European laws. At the end of the nineteenth century. associates of Ukrainian culture, the main task of their position is the solution of a number of political and socio-economic issues. The process of national-cultural revival has gained strength since the 1880's in both parts of Ukraine and at the beginning of the 20th century. already yields concrete results. In Lviv there are active centers of cultural development. Similar processes have been taking place in the other part of Ukraine, activated by the idea of ​​the revival of the Ukrainian national style. At this time, the intellectuals are much more cohesive, trying spiritually and politically self-determination. These moments were extremely important, for at that time, eastern and western parts of Ukraine, notwithstanding certain ideological points of contact, were not only politically delineated, but also mentally, culturally and spiritually. In Ukraine, the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. is characterized by changes in the cultural situation, which are marked by modern (modern) influences from the European West in the field of culture, philosophy, and creativity. The national renaissance acquires a qualitatively new meaning, characterized by the creation of distinctive national forms in all branches of artistic culture. For Ukrainian modernism, the inherent dependence on the geocultural features, the attachment of its representatives to their environment. At the same time, we observe differences in the genre specificity of modernism in the western and eastern Ukrainian territories, due to the influence of Russian or European art. The geographical location of Ukraine between the two parts of the world - Europe and Asia - led to the creation of a unique version of modernism in our territories (tied to national origins, folk folk sources, historical cultural heritage). Stylistic inspirations from different sources flocked to Ukraine, creating polyphony of its modernist art. The contradictory nature of the transitional period has been reflected in the formation of ideological settings of the art of the first third of the twentieth century. Modernism in Ukraine is characterized by an organic combination of the latest philosophical and aesthetic theories and traditional features of local culture. Philosophy played an important role in shaping the foundations of the "new" art and its artistic practice, giving an alternative way for a better understanding of it in the context of the metamorphosis of social consciousness. At the end of the XIX - in the first third of the twentieth century. especially the theories of intuitionism, existentialism, irrationalism, and so on. The theoretical works of Ukrainian artists of the first third of the 20th century, often with a philosophical and aesthetic basis, serve as a significant contribution in the context of the formation of not only a national version of modernism, but also a pan-European one. As a basis for artistic creation, modernists choose a symbolic-allegorical beginning, often serving as both generally accepted and purely national archetypes. If we sum up the process of national-cultural revival in Ukraine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it should be noted that the national movement stimulated the political, social, economic, cultural, and scientific progress of society. Among the values ​​of the intelligentsia was chosen intelligence of Western ideas, including ideas of modern Western philosophy and culture. Worldview principles of modernism in Ukrainian art include interpretation of the historical national and world creative heritage, the use of symbols and archetypes, mythology of creativity, rethinking the achievements of folk art and folklore traditions. Such directions of search determine the conceptual content of the Ukrainian art of this period and the main ideas of creativity of representatives of modernism.