This collection of essays on modernist culture reassesses the convergence of low and high cultures, of socialist and aesthete, late Victorian and young Georgian, the popular and the coterie. Academic literary studies have until recently preferred to treat the "opaque," "difficult" writings of high moderns Conrad, Yeats, Woolf, and Eliot, and the more accessible work of the low moderns Kipling, Shaw, and Wells in separate categories. In contributions by scholars David Bromwich, Roy Foster, Edna Longley, Louis Menand, Edward Mendelson, and others, High and Low Moderns brings these...
This collection of essays on modernist culture reassesses the convergence of low and high cultures, of socialist and aesthete, late Victorian and youn...
Controversies are high drama: in them people speak lines as colorful and passionate as any recited on stage. In the years before the 1916 Rising, public battles were fought in Ireland over French paintings, a maverick priest, Dublin slum children, and theatrical censorship. Controversy was "popular," wrote George Moore, especially "when accompanied with the breaking of chairs."In her new book, Lucy McDiarmid offers a witty and illuminating account of these and other controversies, antagonistic exchanges with no single or no obvious high ground. They merit attention, in her view, not because...
Controversies are high drama: in them people speak lines as colorful and passionate as any recited on stage. In the years before the 1916 Rising, publ...
'Saving civilization' was the grandiloquent cry of the 1920s and 1930s, This is a study of the various answers these three great modern British poets - Yeats, Eliot and Auden - gave to the question of how a 'mere writer' could affect the world of his audience. The author concentrates on the years between the wars, a time when the pressure to save civilization was felt by poets and political leaders alike. The book avoids the typical political labels associated with these poets, such as 'reactionary' or 'leftist'. Rather, it analyses the conflict the three felt between a civic urge to become...
'Saving civilization' was the grandiloquent cry of the 1920s and 1930s, This is a study of the various answers these three great modern British poets ...
Common wisdom has it that when Auden left England for New York in January 1939, he had already written his best poems. He left behind (most critics believe) all the idealisms of the 1930s and all serious concerns to become an unserious poet, a writer of ingenious, agreeable, minor lyrics. Lucy McDiarmid argues that such readers, spoiled by the simple intensities of apocalypse, distort and misjudge Auden's greatest work. She shows that once Auden was freed from the obligation to criticize and reform the society of his native country, he devoted his imaginative energies to commentary on art....
Common wisdom has it that when Auden left England for New York in January 1939, he had already written his best poems. He left behind (most critics...
On the morning of April 24, 1916, Catherine Byrne jumped through a window on the side of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street to join the Irish revolution. Meanwhile, Mairead Ni Cheallaigh served breakfast to Patrick and Willie Pearse - their last home-cooked meal - and then went out to set up an emergency hospital with members of Cumann na mBan. Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh persuaded Thomas MacDonagh to let her into the garrison at Jacob's Biscuit Factory. At Home in the Revolution derives its material from women's own accounts of the Easter Rising, interpreted broadly to include also the...
On the morning of April 24, 1916, Catherine Byrne jumped through a window on the side of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street to join the Irish...
On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet, horse-breeder, Arabist, and anti-imperialist married to Byron's only granddaughter. In this story of the curious occasion that came to be known as the 'peacock dinner, ' immortalized in the famous photograph of the poets standing in a row, Lucy McDiarmid creates a new kind of literary history derived from intimacies rather than 'isms.' The dinner evolved...
On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets...
