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Peter Whiffle (1922) is a novel by Carl Van Vechten. Framing himself as his character’s literary executor, Van Vechten provides a satirical self portrait of his unusual life in the arts through the lens of a man whose sole gift is to identify and move with the avant-garde. Peter Whiffle is a writer who never writes. Throughout his travels, he claims to be researching for an important work of literature but mostly provides humorous portraits of some of the greatest artists, dancers, and writers of his time. In this way, he proves himself much more of a mirror than a window—like Van Vechten likely sensed of his own writing, Whiffle is a man who reflects the success and genius of others much more than he offers his own. Travelling between New York City and Europe, Whiffle becomes a figure who defines his generation through keen wit and tongue-in-cheek wisdom, a tour guide to a vast land of cultural creation and bohemian excess. Peter Whiffle, Van Vechten’s debut novel, is a fascinating work of fiction from a man who was always one step ahead of the rest. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
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The challenges posed by Decadence to Victorian moral conventions - particularly sexual - have been well documented, but this book makes the case for understanding Decadence as a response to the ways in which place was accorded moral value in the period. The book uses landscape as a key trope for exploring Decadent writing's approach to location and identity. Drawing on a wide range of fin-de-siècle literature organised around a series of locations from Naples to New York, Murray argues that Decadent writers developed a form of landscape and place-based writing using a series of stylistic features to challenge the increasing homogenisation of both place and literary culture. Decadence and the literature of the fin de siècle are re-framed as a politically-engaged form of landscape writing. This is an ambitious and richly researched study.
The first scholarly comparative analysis of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of difference.
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.
New York City in the early twentieth century was a hotbed of vice and creativity, and the critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten was at the centre of it all. The Tastemaker explores the many lives of the era's most influential cultural impresario: the critic who brought Gertrude Stein to the nation's attention; the patron of the Harlem Renaissance; the photographer who captured the age's icons; and the novelist who created some of the Jazz Age's most salacious stories. A confidant of Langston Hughes and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Van Vechten frolicked with the 1920s New York demimonde, finding himself in Harlem jazz clubs, Hell's Kitchen speakeasies, and the Greenwich Village underground gay scene. Edward White's revealing biography depicts a controversial figure who defined an age. Embodying many of the contradictions of modern America, Van Vechten was a devoted husband with a coterie of boys by his side, a supporter of difficult art who also loved lowbrow entertainment, and a promoter of the Harlem Renaissance who believed in racial difference. The first full biography of this great American original in nearly half a century, The Tastemaker encompasses its subject's private fears and longings as well as raucous parties fuelled by booze and lust. It is a remarkable portrait of a man whose brave journeys across boundaries of race, sexuality, and taste helped make America fully modern.
This generous, representative sampling from the daybooks of Carl Van Vechten, one of the most significant figures of the Harlem Renaissance, is a rich resource and major reference tool for reconstructing the culture of 1920s New York, the social milieu during Prohibition, and more. Bruce Kellner has provided copious, informative notes identifying central figures and clarifying details.Between 1922 and 1930, Van Vechten kept a daily record of his activities. Not exactly diaries, but more than appointment books, the daybooks record his daily comings and goings as well as the alliances, drinking habits, feuds, and affairs of a wide number of luminaries of the period. They catalog tales of bootlegging, literary teas, shifting cliques of artists and writers, cabaret slumming, sexual and social peccadilloes, and a seemingly endless sequence of parties.