"A fascinating book that takes us deep into Edith Sitwell's world of artifice, disguise, high camp, and verbal ingenuity. In these essays, Sitwell emerges as a central figure in an alternative avant-garde in early twentieth-century Britain."--Faye Hammill, author of Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History Establishing Edith Sitwell at the center of British modernism, this volume showcases her many achievements in poetry, autobiography, novel writing, criticism, art, and performance. Forgoing the gossip about her eccentric appearance and self-fashioned persona that has too often overshadowed serious writing about her work, the contributors explore how Sitwell combined persona and poetry to foster an outpouring of iconoclastic creativity. The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell argues that Sitwell was crucial to the development of a British avant-garde that operated alongside the conventionally accepted transatlantic modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. With Sitwell as an influential literary player and social architect, the British interwar arts scene was not an ascetic escape from personality--as the modernism of Pound and Eliot has often been characterized--but an alternative space of flamboyant, extravagant, and ornate performance. Allan Pero is associate professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. Gyllian Phillips is associate professor of English studies at Nipissing University.

"A fascinating book that takes us deep into Edith Sitwell's world of artifice, disguise, high camp, and verbal ingenuity. In these essays, Sitwell emerges as a central figure in an alternative avant-garde in early twentieth-century Britain."--Faye Hammill, author of Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History Establishing Edith Sitwell at the center of British modernism, this volume showcases her many achievements in poetry, autobiography, novel writing, criticism, art, and performance. Forgoing the gossip about her eccentric appearance and self-fashioned persona that has too often overshadowed serious writing about her work, the contributors explore how Sitwell combined persona and poetry to foster an outpouring of iconoclastic creativity. The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell argues that Sitwell was crucial to the development of a British avant-garde that operated alongside the conventionally accepted transatlantic modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. With Sitwell as an influential literary player and social architect, the British interwar arts scene was not an ascetic escape from personality--as the modernism of Pound and Eliot has often been characterized--but an alternative space of flamboyant, extravagant, and ornate performance. Allan Pero is associate professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. Gyllian Phillips is associate professor of English studies at Nipissing University.

New perspectives on women's contributions to periodical culture in the era of modernismThis collection highlights the contributions of women writers, editors and critics to periodical culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores women's role in shaping conversations about modernism and modernity across varied aesthetic and ideological registers, and foregrounds how such participation was shaped by a wide range of periodical genres. The essays focus on well-known publications and introduce those as yet obscure and understudied - including middlebrow and popular magazines, movement-based, radical papers, avant-garde titles and classic Little Magazines. Examining neglected figures and shining new light on familiar ones, the collection enriches our understanding of the role women played in the print culture of this transformative period.Key FeaturesHelps recover neglected women writers and cast new light on canonical onesHighlights the geographical diversity of modern British print cultureEmphasises the interdisciplinary nature of modernism, including essays on modernist dance, music, cinema, drama and architecture Includes a section on social movement periodicals

Focusing on literature and visual art in the years 1910-1935, Modernist Fraud begins with the omnipresent accusations that modernism was not art at all, but rather an effort to pass off patently absurd works as great art. These assertions, common in the time's journalism, are used to understand the aesthetic and context which spawned them, and to look at what followed in their wake. Fraud discourse ventured into the aesthetic theory of the time, to ideas of artistic sincerity, formalism, and the intentional fallacy. In doing so, it profoundly shaped the modern canon and its justifying principles. Modernist Fraud explores a wide range of materials. It draws on reviews and newspaper accounts of art scandals, such as the 1913 Armory Show, the 1910 and 1912 Postimpressionist shows, and Tender Buttons; to daily syndicated columns; to parodies and doggerel; to actual hoaxes, such as Spectra and Disumbrationism; to the literary criticism of Edith Sitwell; to the trial of Brancusi's Bird in Space; and to the contents of the magazine Blind Man, including a defense of Duchamp's Fountain, a poem by Bill Brown, and the works of, and an interview with, the bafflingly unstable painter Louis Eilshemius. In turning to these materials, the book reevaluates how modernism interacted with the public and describes how a new aesthetic begins: not as a triumphant explosion that initiates irrevocable changes, but as an uncertain muddling and struggle with ideology.

In drawing together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from across the UK and America, Eco-Modernism offers a diverse range of environmental and ecological interpretations of modernist texts and illustrates that ecocriticism can offer fresh and provocative ways of understanding literary modernism.

This book provides a fresh assessment of the works of British-born poet and painter Mina Loy. Laura Scuriatti shows how Loy’s “eccentric” writing and art celebrate ideas and aesthetics central to the modernist movement while simultaneously critiquing them, resulting in a continually self-reflexive and detached stance that Scuriatti terms “critical modernism.” Drawing on archival material, Scuriatti illuminates the often-overlooked influence of Loy’s time spent amid Italian avant-garde culture. In particular, she considers Loy’s assessment of the nature of genius and sexual identity as defined by philosopher Otto Weininger and in Lacerba, a magazine founded by Giovanni Papini. She also investigates Loy’s reflections on the artistic masterpiece in relation to the world of commodities; explores the dialogic nature of the self in Loy’s autobiographical projects; and shows how Loy used her “eccentric” stance as a political position, especially in her later career in the United States. Offering new insights into Loy’s feminism and tracing the writer’s lifelong exploration of themes such as authorship, art, identity, genius, and cosmopolitanism, this volume prompts readers to rethink the place, value, and function of key modernist concepts through the critical spaces created by Loy’s texts.

This book examines the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of a single year, 1964. The book analyses specific events that occurred in 1964 as benchmarks of the Civil Right Movement, making the case that 1964 was a watershed year. Each chapter considers individually politics, rhetoric, sports, dramatic literature, film, art, and music, breaking down the events and illustrating their importance to the social and political life in the United States in 1964. This study emphasizes 1964 as a nodal point in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, arguing that it was within this single year that the tide against racism and injustice turned markedly. This book will be of great interest to the scholars and students of civil rights, theatre and performance, art history, and drama literature.

Modernism, Sex, and Gender is an up-to-date and in-depth review of how theories of gender and sexuality have shaped the way modernism has been read and interpreted from its inception to the present day. The volume explores four key aspects of modernist literature and criticism that have contributed to the new modernist studies: women's contributions to modernism; masculinities; sexuality; and the intersection of gender and sexuality with politics and law. Including brief case studies of such writers as May Sinclair and Radclyffe Hall, this book is a valuable guide for those looking to understand the history of critical thought on gender and sexuality in modernist studies today.

At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of “the age of noise” on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level. Frattarola tunes in to representations of voices, noise, and music in works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. She argues that the common use of headphones, which piped sounds from afar into a listener’s headspace, inspired modernists to record the interior monologues of their characters in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf’s onomatopoeia stemmed from a desire to render the sounds of the world without mediation, similar to how some contemporaries hoped that recording technology would eliminate the need for musicians. Frattarola also explains how Beckett’s linguistic repetition mirrors the mechanical reproduction of the tape recorder. These writers challenged ocularcentrism, the traditional emphasis on vision in art and philosophy, and instead characterized the eye as distancing and analytical and the act of listening as immediate and unifying. Contending that the experimentation typically associated with modernist writing is partly due to this new attentiveness to sound, this book introduces a fresh perspective on texts that set the course of contemporary literature.