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Drawing on the figure and discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman, this book examines women writers who struggled with conservative, patriarchal ideologies of motherhood in novels, periodicals and life writings of the long modernist period. It shows how these writers challenged, resisted, adapted and negotiated traditional ideas with their own versions of new motherhood, with needs for identities and experiences beyond maternity. Tracing the period from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth, this study explores how some of the numerous elements and forces we identify with modernism are manifested in equally diverse and often competing representations of mothers, mothering and motherhood. It investigates how historical personages and fictional protagonists used and were constructed within textual spaces where they engaged critically with the maternal as institution, identity and practice, from perspectives informed by gender, sexuality, nationhood, race and class. The matrifocal literatures examined in this book exemplify how feminist motherhoods feature as a prominent thematic of the long modernist era and how rebellious New Woman mothers provocatively wrote maternity into text and history.
Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study analyzes these authors in tandem with Derrida’s work on the gender-specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition. The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a constant crisis vis-à-vis the mother’s body as site of both origin and dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative traits.
Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal argues that a focus on the construction of mother-figures in Irish culture illuminates the extraordinary achievement of the Irish modernists. Essentially, the seminal Irish modernists - Moore, Joyce, Synge, Yeats and O'Casey - resisted those mother-figures sanctioned by cultural discourses, re-writing her in order to elude her. In this, they not only re-constituted language and representation, they accessed and re-figured their own creative selves.
The first full-length study on T. S. Eliot and the mother, this book responds to a shortfall in understanding the true importance of Eliot’s poet-mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, to his life and works. In doing so, it radically rethinks Eliot’s ambivalence towards women. In a context of mother–son ambivalence (simultaneous feelings of love and hate), it shows how his search for belief and love converged with a developing maternal poetics. Importantly, the chapters combine standard literary critical methods and extensive archival research with innovative feminist, maternal and psychoanalytic theorisations of mother–child relationships, such as those developed by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin, Jan Campbell and Rozsika Parker. These maternal thinkers emphasise the vital importance and benefit of recognising the pre-Oedipal mother and maternal subjectivity, contrary to traditional, repressive Oedipal models of masculinity. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters look at Eliot’s changing representations and articulations of the mother/ mother–child relationship from his very earliest writings through to the later plays. Focus is given to decisive mid-career works: Ash-Wednesday (1930), ‘Marina’ (1930), ‘Coriolan’ (1931–32) and The Family Reunion (1939), as well as to canonical works The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Notably, the study draws heavily on the wide range of Eliot materials now available, including the new editions of the complete poems, the complete prose and the volumes of letters, which are transforming our perception of the poet and challenging critical attitudes. The book also gives unprecedented attention to Charlotte Eliot’s life and writings and brings her individual female experience and subjectivity to the fore. Significantly, it establishes Charlotte’s death in 1929 as a decisive juncture, marking both Eliot’s New Life and the apotheosis of the feminine symbolised in Ash-Wednesday. Central to this proposition is Geary’s new formulation for recognising and examining a maternal poetics, which also compels a new concept of maternal allegory as a modern mode of literary epiphany. T. S. Eliot and the Mother reveals the role of the mother and the dynamics of mother–son ambivalence to be far more complicated, enduring, changeable and essential to Eliot’s personal, religious and poetic development than previously acknowledged.
Narcissistic mothers are an important motif in modernist literature. Tracing its appearance in the works of writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, this book questions the dichotomous image of either benevolent or suffocating mother, which has pervaded religion, art, and literature for centuries. Instead of focusing on the mother-child dyad as characterized primarily by maternal domination and the child's submission, Marie Géraldine Rademacher insists on the definitional nuances of the term "narcissism" and considers the political and socioeconomic context of the time in shaping these women's narcissistic behavior. The study thus inspires a more positive (re)reading of the protagonists.
Arguing for a radical re-evaluation of the modernist aesthetic, the essayists consider how women writers created their own version of modernism through the use of sentimental and domestic subject matter, by writing about maternal concerns, and through experiments with plot, voice, and points of view.
In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ten eminent scholars from Britain and the United States offer timely new appraisals of the revolutionary cultural transformations of the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapters on the major literary genres, intellectual, political and institutional contexts, film and the visual arts, provide both close analyses of individual works and a broader set of interpretive narratives. A chronology and guide to further reading supply valuable orientation for the study of Modernism. Readers will be able to use the book at once as a standard work of reference and as a stimulating source of compelling new readings of works by writers and artists from Joyce and Woolf to Stein, Picasso, Chaplin, H. D. and Freud, and many others. Students will find much-needed help with the difficulties of approaching Modernism, while the essays' original contributions will send scholars back to this volume for stimulating re-evaluation.
Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today's highly propagandized world. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.
Modernism's Other Work challenges our view of relationships between aesthetic autonomy and the world of daily life--a conjuncture that Lisa Siraganian demonstrates has often been misunderstood in critical studies of modernism. Connecting poetry to the visual arts and politics, the author provides new ways to think about modernist art's relationship.
Imogen's family didn't have much, and life was hard atop the wild hill they call home. But when Imogen declared she wanted to be a photographer, her father built her her very own darkroom. Flash forward. Imogen is a photographer and a mother. She has her hands full! How does she do it all? She turns the garden into a wonderland for her three growing boys and a workshop for herself. While she works, her boys play, and Imogen photographs them. Click. Click. Click. Photographing her sons leads Imogen to focus on plants and flowers -- most notably her signature magnolia blossoms--for which she will become best known. Here, then, is the story of Imogen Cunningham, one of the finest photographers of the 20th century and mother to three boys.