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Abstract: In 1929, the Paris-based Black Sun Press (formerly known as Editions Narcisse) run by Caresse and Harry Crosby published a slim volume of hand-drawn images and handwritten texts by a fellow American named Bob (Robert Carlton) Brown. Titled 1450–1950, and printed in a run of 150 copies, Brown's book is the very antitype of the high-end books that the press is known for.1 Printed by the Parisian "Maître-Imprimeur" Roger Lescaret and using only the optimum quality papers and inks, the Black Sun Press titles by, among others, James Joyce and Ezra Pound are notable for the quality of their production.2 Compared to these specimens of what Jerome McGann considers modernist extensions of "the late nineteenth-century ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: T. S. Eliot's unresolved pursuit in aesthetic and critical writings prior to Four Quartets might aptly be ascribed to a throwback dissatisfaction encountered during his doctoral studies: philosophical ideologies failed to offer a "clear conception of what the word human implies."1 For a post-conversion Eliot, accomplishing this "clear conception" required reconciliation of the encountered quotidian, the revealed sacred, and the combined ethical, historical, and cultural aspects of how we are as humans. In 1941, amidst writing Four Quartets and pondering how—or even whether—a reader might perceive Eliot's threefold integration as an authentic picture of a human, Eliot mused that "there are really three roses in the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: There is a recurring primal scene played out in the story of modern literature and censorship, but it is one that has all too rarely been commented upon in the scholarship around print culture. Someone walks into a bookstore and asks for a certain volume; when the proprietor or clerk hands over the said book to the customer, a legal trap is sprung and the bookseller or clerk is then taken to court for the supply of obscene materials. Thus was the scenario that befell Shig Murao on June 3, 1957, when he supplied a copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems to two undercover policemen in San Francisco's City Lights bookshop. The subsequent trial of Murao, along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as the book's publisher ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: William Carlos Williams has consistently been coupled with automobiles both in the popular imagination and in his scholarly reception. In Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film Paterson, Adam Driver's character drives around Paterson, New Jersey, writing and reading poetry, not least that by Williams.1 The wonderful Voices & Visions documentary on Williams, aired on PBS in 1988, begins with a driver on the open road who then stops to write poetry on his "William C. Williams, M.D." prescription pad. The coupling of driving with the long poem Paterson (1946–1958), which Jarmusch's film solidifies, is anachronistic, as little driving occurs in that poem, where we can read for example in Book Five (1958) that "you can't see ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: At the Egyptian town of Qift, in the 1893–94 archaeological season, the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie uncovered three colossal statues of the god Min.1 The deity of male sexual potency, Min was most often depicted with an erect penis, though as is often the case with ancient statuary, these sculptures are incomplete. Effigies of Min were not only particularly susceptible to the loss of their penises as a result of the protrusions' vulnerability to damage (due both to their shape and their frequent manufacture from a separate piece of stone to the body), but they were often vandalized by those who found them obscene. Evidence suggests that even Petrie, a seasoned professional, may not have greeted instances of the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the September 1913 issue of the London-based journal Poetry and Drama, Harold Monro made the astonishing declaration that not only would the issue be devoted to the work of the Italian futurists, but also that the members of the periodical "claim ourselves, also, to be futurists." The announcement was followed by Monro's assertion that "long ago, before we had heard of the Italian Movement, we conceived the desire to 'serve, worship, and obey the beautiful Future,'" and a short, enumerated list of aims:The first principles of our Futurism are:I. To forget God, Heaven, Hell, Personal Immortality, and to remember, always, the earth.II. To lift the eyes from a sentimental contemplation of the past, and, though ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Krasiński's composition was suspended in air, it was floating by a miracle of levitation—above the grass, on which it left its red splashes, initially it moved vertically upwards, then, turning suddenly in a horizontal direction, it visibly gained a force through a length, that faded from black to white; then, after losing its continuity, it imposed itself after an interval (full of the expectation of a stroke) with its sharp, more and more red spike piercing the horizon. The creation caused me to exclaim with surprise: that is an "aerial creation," newness. When I came closer, I understood the miracle of levitation: Krasiński stretched his "spear of the atomic age" … on the thin wires strung between the trees. But ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Nowadays, after the so-called "free verse revolution," it can be difficult to access the way poets and readers thought about poetry before it was disentangled from meter. To do so, we must reverse a century of literary history that redefined poetry and forget the distinction we have been taught between meter and verse. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser does precisely this. In fact, his study reveals the importance of counted meter—iambic pentameter, no less—even for those writers, such as Ezra Pound, who most vociferously denounced it as fusty and artificial. Glaser returns to the moment when this reconceptualization took place and examines the way that meter persisted, and continues to persist, as a vestige ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Matthew Sturgis's biography of Oscar Wilde, Oscar: A Life (2018), begins with a recent catalogue of Wilde's commercial manifestations, including T-shirts and mobile phone cases. In the intervening time between Sturgis's volume and the one previously regarded as the gold standard of Wilde biography, Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde (1987), the world of Wilde merchandise has only further blossomed in the proliferating markets of late capitalism. Deaglán Ó Donghaile, with his monograph Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle, asks us to remember that Wilde was not simply a quippy provocateur. He was also a radical, something one could easily miss for the way that his memorable epigrams have been made ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The 59th Venice Biennale, which opened in April 2022, announced that its title, The Milk of Dreams, was taken from a notebook of children's stories and drawings called Leche del sueño made in Mexico by the surrealist Leonora Carrington. "Carrington's stories describe a world set free, brimming with possibilities," said Biennale curator Cecilia Alemani, referring to the metamorphosed characters that Carrington created during the second half of the 1950s, such as the boy "Headless John," who has wings in place of ears and a head that detaches and gleefully flies away.1 However, Biennale organizers also clarified that they selected Carrington's notebook, made as a gift for her own children, because it is an "allegory ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As Susan McCabe notes at the beginning of her magisterial new biography, H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism, modernist poet H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle) and writer and humanitarian Bryher (born Winifred Ellerman) entered a "union" in which each was the other's center. McCabe calls Bryher H.D.'s "main invisible" who made H.D. "visible" (310). Without her, H.D. "might have lost her creative drive," but without H.D., who shielded Bryher from familial pressures to conform to social conventions, Bryher "might have done herself in" (311). As their "curious" story unfolds in McCabe's riveting telling, a love story emerges in terms that have only become available in the twenty-first century. H.D. was bisexual ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: With its tight focus on figuration in a hypercanonical trio of authors—Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf—Dora Zhang's Strange Likeness feels almost deliberately unfashionable. Its fine readings, its deft deployment of narrative theory, its rigorous illuminations of the uses of description and metaphor in modernism, all read in many ways like the work of an earlier and more confident moment in the history of literary studies. It is refreshingly free of the cant that can seem everywhere now: the trumped-up claims for ethical urgency, the desperate engagements with novel and often barely relevant theoretical frameworks, and the confused substitution of criticism for politics. At a moment when not just ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The story that art history tells about its object's trajectory under modernism—at least since Clement Greenberg's 1961 lecture "Modernist Painting"—hinges on the purification of the medium in its move toward abstraction. This would seem to constitute a conceptual barrier to interdisciplinary analyses of the visual arts. But in her illuminating and riveting monograph Moving Modernism: The Urge to ion in Painting, Dance, Cinema, Nell Andrew—an art historian by training—turns this disciplinary restriction on its head. Arguing that abstraction, far from being specific to painting, shared inspirations, goals, and methods with contemporaneous innovations in dance and cinema, and that in all three art forms it was ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On page four of Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, Victoria Rosner writes: "The title of the leading journal in modernist studies, Modernism/modernity, separates them [modernism and modernity] with a dividing bar, accentuating the space between even as it brings them into relation. … My objective in this book is to discard the dividing bar" (4).As Rosner suggests, a solidus not only accentuates space but represents division and exclusion between two terms. While it can connect noncontrasting terms (Hemingway/Faulkner generation) a solidus, or virgule, avoids taking positions. In opposition, Rosner's Machines for Living sets out her clear belief that "the revolution that was modernism was profoundly ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Whoever thought Josephine Baker's banana skirt might represent a sly critique of the commercial inadequacy and declining colonial power of France' In Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852–1932, Lyneise Williams begins her keen analysis of French visual interpretations of Latin American immigrants in Paris by provocatively rereading Baker's iconic fruity attire. Miguel Covarrubias, the Mexican designer of the skirt, had long challenged European claims of artistic superiority. Noting this, Williams traces the conspicuous increase in banana imports to France from the Caribbean from 1897 to 1924—drawing attention to the specific banana varieties that likely comprised Baker's skirt—to suggest Covarrubias's ... Read More PubDate: 2022-12-15T00:00:00-05:00
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