38 research outputs found
The silence of the last poet: Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and the value of the classic
No full textThis essay explores the conceptions of the classic, and of literary value more generally, in T. S. Eliot's “What Is a Classic?” and Matthew Arnold's “Study of Poetry.” Eliot's address heavily depends on Arnold's study, but there are significant points of difference, especially when it comes to the question of Homer and Virgil. Fundamentally, though, both Arnold and Eliot reach toward a transcendental, even religious, view of the classic. The essay concludes by developing the implications of Eliot's “last poet” and the silencing qualities of the classic hinted at in his address. These qualities have not been sufficiently understood, but taking them seriously shows why the current defense of the classic is dubious
The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature by Peter Kalliney (review)
No full textInternational audienc
Finding the Center : Mrs Dalloway 's Bureaucrats and State Centralization
No full textInternational audienceAbstract Although the rise of the bureaucratic state was one of the most startling transformations of early twentieth-century British society, novelists raised on a diet of laissez-faire liberalism tended to shy away from direct representations of bureaucracy (with some prominent exceptions, such as the Circumlocution Office in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit or Anthony Trollope's Three Clerks). Although squarely set within the “governing-class spirit” of Westminster and populated with a bevy of civil servants, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway tends to be read as maintaining a strict public-private division with a marked preference for the richness and beauty of private life. This article argues that Woolf, no stranger to the civil service through her family and personal networks, had a more strained and ambivalent response to bureaucracy as an idea and government form. A close reading of the structural importance of Hugh Whitbread's character, a minor figure who is often read as an empty, flat Dickensian caricature of the gentleman, shows a more ambivalent response to how bureaucracy and its forms impacted the wider concerns raised about governmentality in Woolf's novel
Pound's <i>Four Pages</i>: “Literary Camouflage” and Postwar Anonymous Propaganda
No full textAbstractThis essay examines Ezra Pound's behind-the-scenes control of the little review Four Pages, which ran for fifteen issues from 1948 to 1951. After his return to the United States in 1945 to face charges of treason, Pound was declared mentally incompetent and institutionalized in a mental hospital in the nation's capital. With his publishers attempting to rehabilitate Pound's public standing by spotlighting his purely “literary” efforts, Pound had to resort to anonymous publication to continue to have a say on contemporary matters. This essay shows how Pound essentially created and edited a little review to have a venue that pushed his social and political ideas at a time when doing so openly was problematic for legal and political reasons. The use of anonymity as a writer and editor was part of the wider “literary camouflage” that Four Pages engaged in to advance Pound's wider cultural and political agenda.</jats:p
The forms and functions of back story in the novel
No full textInternational audienceThis articles develops a theory of back story (exposition) in the novel
Fictions of class and community in Henry Green's Living
No full textInternational audienceThe dominant critical consensus of Henry Green’s fiction is that it is anti-mimetic and abstracted from society, a starting point that invariably cuts off any reflection about the correspondences between Green’s novels and social conditions. This article examines Living and argues that a deeper understanding of its structure, meaning, and thematic can be acquired by considering its relationship to the particular working-class conditions and culture of 1920s Birmingham. The analysis considers the novel’s worker-employee relationships and its specific use of language from this vantage point. Living is also an interesting example of a regional modernist novel set within an urban center, a type of novel that modernist scholars have largely overlooked
A guilty self-portrait: Henry Green’s pack my bag
No full textInternational audienceThis essay argues that Henry Green's autobiographical Pack My Bag is not only a significant achievement in its own right, but also of great interest to readers intrigued by the varieties of modernism and theories of autobiography. Green, the most consciously experimental novelist of his time, wrote an autobiography that, in many ways, confounds expectations of the genre. While establishing himself as a victim of the impending Second World War, Green's text moves quickly to shame remembered, an obsessive rumination on guilt. This interplay between innocence and guilt is the structuring principle of Pack My Bag
The aristocratic avant-garde: Le Comte Étienne de Beaumont and “Les Soirées de Paris”
No full textInternational audienceAristocratic patronage of the historical avant-garde remains a relatively understudied phenomenon, if only because the aristocracy seemed the avant-garde’s natural enemy and what the avant-garde sought to supplant. This article examines the 1924 “Les Soirées de Paris,” a five-week-long series of commissioned ballets, plays, and performances financed by Le Comte Étienne de Beaumont. Paying close attention to the social divide in Tzara’s Mouchoir de Nuages, this article seeks to show the fraught relationship between the aristocracy and the Parisian avant-garde. Beaumont’s intervention into the Parisian cultural field was an attempt to derail the growing influence of the market but also had a more positive motivation in attempting to showcase the “best” of “new” French art. If Beaumont was bitingly satirized in Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, this “last Maecenas of the arts” was a more complex figure who deserves closer examination for the role that he played in bringing together a series of artists—Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, and Tzara—in a lavishly produced series of original works
