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1 From literary modernism to photogénie Mass culture and cinepoetry Born in 1897, Jean Epstein belongs to the generation that came of age during the protracted carnage of World War One, as did André Breton (b. 1896), Tristan Tzara (b. 1896), René Clair (b. 1898), or László Moholy-Nagy (b. 1895). Recall that this was not one conflict among many, but the deadliest war in history, with more than 30 million dead, and an average of over 3,000 soldiers killed daily. Such mad figures resulted from unprecedented technological ‘progress’ deployed on all sides: huge
This study, which examines a range of canonical and less-well-known writers, is a reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism. It examines six late Victorian writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition that surfaces towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of a growing materialism. Offering detailed readings of both poetry and prose, the book shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, though without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen. It is a re-evaluation of the post-Romantic visionary imagination, with implications for our understanding of literary modernism.
Theory often eclipses the text, just as the moon's shadow obscures the sun in an eclipse, so that the text loses its own voice and begins to voice theory. This book provides summaries or descriptions of a number of important theoretical essays. It commences with an account of the 'liberal humanism' against which all newer critical approaches to literature, broadly speaking, define themselves. The book suggests a useful form of intensive reading, which breaks down the reading of a difficult chapter or article into five stages, as designated by the letters 'SQRRR': Survey, Question, Read, Recall, and Review. It explains the rise of English studies by indicating what higher education was like in England until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The book talks about the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. It lists some differences and distinctions between structuralism and post-structuralism under the four headings: origins, tone and style, attitude to language, and project. Providing a clear example of deconstructive practice, the book then describes three stages of the deconstructive process: the verbal, the textual, and the linguistic. It includes information on some important characteristics of literary modernism practiced by various writers, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism and queer theory. The book presents an example of Marxist criticism, and discusses the overlap between cultural materialism and new historicism, specific differences between conventional close reading and stylistics and insights on narratology. It covers the story of literary theory through ten key events.
Algernon Charles Swinburne is acknowledged to be one of the most important Victorian poets, a founding figure for British aestheticism, and the dominant influence for many fin-de-siècle and modernist poets. This book is a collection of essays that re-evaluate his literary contribution. It brings together some of the best new scholarship on Swinburne, resituating him in the light of current critical work on cosmopolitanism, politics, print culture, form, Victorian Hellenism, religious controversy, gender and sexuality, the arts, and aestheticism and its contested relation to literary modernism. The first section lays emphasis on Swinburne's embeddedness and centrality in a culture from which he has been partly written out. It examines Swinburne's involvement in the history of cosmopolitanism, a field of enquiry that is attracting growing attention among literary critics. This section provides complementary accounts of the difficult and often invisible dynamics behind influence and marginalisation, unveiling narratives of problematic acceptance and problematic rejection, by a female and a male poet respectively. Through a detailed examination of Swinburne's unpublished flagellatory poem 'The Flogging-Block', the book discovers a web of connections between the nineteenth-century culture of metrical discipline and the pedagogic discipline of minors portrayed through sexual fantasy. The last section of the book examines Swinburne's own influence on his modernist successors. The twin mechanics of poetic dialogue and cultural polemic is also discussed. T. S. Eliot's ambivalence towards Swinburne left a strong mark on twentieth-century criticism.
In New York and in Paris from 1930 to 1970, daring publishers produced banned English-language literature, and young writers, poets and artists wrote pornography to order, often anonymously. Some of those involved were, or became, famous (Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin); others less so. In New York, they wrote for a broker for a mysterious oil magnate who sought pornography for his own sexual gratification, though some of the product would go on to be published more widely. In Paris, the publication of English-language erotic writing was generated by two innovative publishers. Jack Kahane, with the Obelisk Press in the 1930s, published work banned or impossible to publish in England or America. In the 1950s and 1960s, Kahane’s son, the publisher Maurice Girodias, with the Olympia Press, produced avant-garde, modernist literature as well as unadulterated porn – dirty books, or ‘dbs’. Girodias attempted a reprise in New York in the 1960s, but the venture failed. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided. Men wrote as women; women wrote as men. Indeed, many women were involved in this written pornography. Dirty Books examines these fascinating moments in pornographic history, writing the sexual revolution before the sexual revolution.
-century literary modernism.18 It was probably she who introduced La Motte to Mary Borden. Stein’s ‘salon’ at the rue de Fleurus in Paris was a recognised avant-garde centre of art and literature. Although their emphases were different, Borden and La Motte wrote in similar styles, drawing upon their personal experiences to produce terse and harrowing accounts of the war.19 La Motte – a descendent of influential French Huguenots – was probably motivated, at least in part, by a desire to support her ancestral homeland.20 When she first arrived in Paris, she nursed at the American
of the English Review, author of The Good Soldier and transformer of Ezra Pound’s verse, he performed a vital part. Indeed, Max Saunders writes in his magisterial biography of Ford that ‘the period of literary modernism is “the Ford era” as much as it is Pound’s, or T. S. Eliot’s, or Joyce’s’; Ford was ‘at the centre of the three most innovative groups of writers this century’.4 In addition, the language of decline, collapse and fragmentation is commonly applied by historical analysts to events and developments of the early twentieth century. These were the years
those in attendance as ‘Bloomsbury bacilli’. 100 The BUF’s hostility to ‘Bloomsbury’ culture did not derive solely from the latter’s alleged obsession with sex, however. ‘Bloomsbury’ developed into a general term of abuse in the Mosleyite lexicon for a wide spectrum of intellectual activity extending beyond the literary modernist elite. This hostility is all the more surprising given that the portents for a meaningful alliance between literary modernism and fascism appeared to be good during the interwar period. Both, for example, were antagonistic towards bourgeois
figures, along with their canonization as key authors of modernism in general, and the centrality of Paris as a real, imaginary and symbolic metropolis of modernity, that blinds us to the fact that the story of French literary modernism has not yet been told. French modernism stands symbolically as the black hole in the heart of the galaxy of global modernism: everyone acknowledges its inescapable gravitational pull, everyone knows it is there, but no one seems able to see it, much less describe it. Consider, for instance, how modernism in France is approached in two
Maria Rilke. Some of the important characteristics of the literary modernism practised by these writers include the following: A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we see rather than what we see (a preoccupation evident in the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique). A movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. A blurring of the distinctions between genres, so that novels tend to