The manifestos and other texts I have examined in this book convey a particularly modernist sensibility: they yearn for the time of the new, an elsewhere, that will deliver freedom and authenticity. Manifesto writers, in particular, sought to transform modernity so that it would overcome ignorance, servitude, and injustice. But such modernist longings as expressed via the manifesto have always been compromised. While the manifesto is the form par excellence of modernist rupture (with its singular break from the past that relies upon a cutting-edge understanding of “the new”), it was already ironized and questioned by modernists themselves, as my readings of Virginia Woolf, C. L. R. James, Zora Neale Hurston, Rebecca West, Mina Loy, F. T. Marinetti, and Wyndham Lewis attest. The manifesto has never been a complete break with the past, though its speech acts – “we declare,” “we reject” – would seem through the forceful agency of their words to sever it completely from the past in order to usher in a revolutionary new world. Instead, the manifesto and other texts both break from the past and reconfigure (re-cite) what has preceded it. This belatedness creates a fold in time, a future anterior, in which revolutionary transformation is projected as a future aspiration of accomplishment.