Groups coteries circles and guilds : modernist aesthetics and the utopian lure of community In the first few decades of the twentieth century artists intellectuals writers thinkers and patrons gave birth to groups and movements in Europe and the United States with the aim of providing alternatives to the increasingly conflictual political and intellectual climate. This book offers studies of under researched (and often consciously provincial) avant garde and modernist groups and authors. Their progressive aims are here read as particular forms of utopia based on the ethics and aesthetics of community. The essays in this volume analyse the significance (and failures) of literary coteries as spaces of aesthetic and political freedom. They explore the internationalist and interdisciplinary practices of the Porza Group the abstrakten hannover and the anthroposophical group Aenigma; the utopian efforts of the artists communities at Monte Verità (Switzerland) Farley Farm Ditchling and Millthorpe in England; the political and aesthetic implications of collaborative practices of cultural mediation criticism and translation with the Bloomsbury group the Young American Critics and of single individuals in relation to networks such as Mina Loy Djuna Barnes Marianne Moore Lola Ridge. The volume offers an evaluation of the ethos of sociability in the womens salons of the Enlightenment as the basis of the utopia of community; it also reflects on the problematic notion of individual authorship within a group as in the case of the early modernist Finnish author Algot Untola who created circa forty fictitious author names