The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics

ISBN-13: 9780312240370 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 312 str.

Lesley Hall Higgins

Opis

Cult of ugliness, Ezra Pounds phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme;the self-styled "Men of 1914";responded to the "horrid or sordid or disgusting" conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practice. Only the representation of "ugliness," they protested, would produce the new, truly "beautiful" work of art. They dissociated the beautiful from its traditional embodiment in female beauty, and from its association with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Their cultivation of ugliness displaced misogyny and homophobia. Higgins takes in texts such as John Ruskins art criticism, Eliots literary journalism, Lewiss pro-fascism pamphlets, and the poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. She demonstrates that even vigorous champions of beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery.

Recenzje

'...Informed, scholarly work...it has an attractive interdisciplinarity...there is a freshness to the focus.' - Bonnie Kine Scott, University of Delaware.

Spis treści

Introduction The Trials of Beauty: Ruskin, Whistler, and a 'New Series of Truths' No Time for Pater: Breaking the Homophobic Silence 'I Too Have Tried to be Modern': Reconsidering Yeats's 'Terrible Beauty' 'I Think We Are in Rats' Alley': Canvassing Modernism's 'Cult of Ugliness' 'O City, City': Gendered Topographies in Modern American Poetry

O autorze

LESLEY HIGGINS is an Associate Professor of English at York University, Toronto, Canada.