Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group


Book Description

The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield associated intimately with many members of the Bloomsbury group, but her literary aesthetics placed her at a distance from the artistic works of the group. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group explores this conflicted relationship. Bringing together biographical and critical studies, the book examines Mansfield's relationships – personal and literary – with such major Modernist figures as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Walter de la Mare as well as the ways in which her work engaged with and reacted against Bloomsbury. In this way the book reveals the true extent of Mansfield's wider influence on 20th-century modernist writing.




The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Volume I


Book Description

The first volume of the first paperback edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot This two-volume critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s poems establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909–1962, rectifying accidental omissions and errors that have crept in during the century since Eliot’s astonishing debut, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In addition to the masterpieces, The Poems of T. S. Eliot contains the poems of Eliot’s youth, which were rediscovered only decades later; poems that circulated privately during his lifetime; and love poems from his final years, written for his wife, Valerie. Calling upon Eliot’s critical writings as well as his drafts, letters, and other original materials, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the imaginative life of each poem. This first volume respects Eliot’s decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909–1962 as he arranged and issued it shortly before his death. This is followed by poems uncollected but either written for or suitable for publication, and by a new reading text of the drafts of The Waste Land. The second volume opens with the two books of verse of other kinds that Eliot issued: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Anabasis, his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase. Each of these sections is accompanied by its own commentary. Finally, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a comprehensive textual history that contains not only variants from all known drafts and the many printings but also extended passages amounting to hundreds of lines of compelling verse.




D. H. Lawrence, Transport and Cultural Transition


Book Description

This book discusses D. H. Lawrence’s interest in, and engagement with, transport as a literal and metaphorical focal point for his ontological concerns. Focusing on five key novels, this book explores issues of mobility, modernity and gender. First exploring how mechanized transportation reflects industry and patriarchy in Sons and Lovers, the book then considers issues of female mobility in The Rainbow, the signifying of war transport in Women in Love, revolution and the meeting of primitive and modern in The Plumed Serpent, and the reflection of dystopian post-war concerns in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Appealing to Lawrence, modernist, and mobilities researchers, this book is also of interest to readers interested in early twentieth century society, the First World War and transport history.




Virginia Woolf


Book Description

First published in 1979, Virginia Woolf is an original critical study of where the author considers Virginia Woolf’s non-fiction as well as fiction, exploring the different ways Woolf sought to embody her artistic vision throughout her remarkable literary career. The book establishes both the intellectual and social setting of the Bloomsbury world in which she lived and includes detailed discussions of all her work. Woolf’s unending quest to express, as she says, ‘the exact shapes my brain holds,’ provides us with a new method of appreciating her total achievement as a writer. This book will be of interest to students of literature and women’s studies.




The Letters of T. S. Eliot


Book Description

This fifth volume of the collected letters of poet, playwright, essayist, and literary critic Thomas Stearns Eliot covers the years 1930 through 1931. It was during this period that the acclaimed American-born writer earnestly embraced his newly avowed Anglo-Catholic faith, a decision that earned him the antagonism of friends like Virginia Woolf and Herbert Read. Also evidenced in these correspondences is Eliot’s growing estrangement from his wife Vivien, with the writer’s newfound dedication to the Anglican Church exacerbating the unhappiness of an already tormented union. Yet despite his personal trials, this period was one of great literary activity for Eliot. In 1930 he composed the poems Ash-Wednesday and Marina, and published Coriolan and a translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase the following year. As director at the British publishing house Faber & Faber and editor of The Criterion, he encouraged W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Ralph Hogdson, published James Joyce’s Haveth Childers Everywhere, and turned down a book proposal from Eric Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell. Through Eliot’s correspondences from this time the reader gets a full-bodied view of a great artist at a personal, professional, and spiritual crossroads.




Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism


Book Description

'Amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane' - THE TIMES 'Revelatory' - GUARDIAN 'Restores Clive Bell vividly to life' - Lucasta Miller ______________ Clive Bell is perhaps better known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of artist Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. His groundbreaking book Art brazenly subverted the narratives of art history and cemented his status as the great interpreter of modern art. Bell was also an ardent pacifist and a touchstone for the Wildean values of individual freedoms, and his is a story that leads us into an extraordinary world of intertwined lives, loves and sexualities. For decades, Bell has been an obscure figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings him to the fore, drawing on personal letters, archives and Bell's own extensive writing. Complete with a cast of famous characters, including Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism is a fascinating portrait of a man who became one of the pioneering voices in art of his era. Reclaiming Bell's stature among the makers of modernism, Hussey has given us a biography to muse and marvel over – a snapshot of a time and of a man who revelled in and encouraged the shock of the new. 'A book of real substance written with style and panache, copious fresh information and many insights' - Julian Bell




The British Aristocracy in Popular Culture


Book Description

As traditional social hierarchies fall away, ever steeper levels of economic inequality and the entrenchment of new class distinctions lend a new glamor to the idea of aristocracy: witness the worldwide popularity of Downton Abbey, or the seemingly insatiable public fascination with the private lives of the British royal family. This collection of new essays investigates the enduring attraction to the icon of the aristocrat and the spectacle of aristocratic society. It traces the ambivalent reactions the aristocracy provokes and the needs (political, ideological, psychological, and otherwise) it caters to in modern times when the economic power of the landed classes have been eroded and their political role curtailed. In this interdisciplinary collection, aristocracy is considered from multiple viewpoints, including British and American literature, European history and politics, cultural studies, linguistics, visual arts, music, and media studies.




The Butterfly Hatch


Book Description

Some of H.D.s most oft-quoted lines have to do with the meaning and value of words; they are conditioned to hatch butterflies. Yet rather than seeking merely to understand how H.D. represented the meaning and value of words, this volume uses the butterfly hatch as a metaphor for thinking more broadly about the capacity of literary experience to hatch transformed persons butterflies in quest of wisdom in university English studies. Dislodging H.D. from her usual modernist context, this book positions her as a thinker and reads her autobiographical prose and recently published work of the 1940s for its ability to offer new insights into such pertinent and interconnected areas as literary contexts, imagination, and personal and social transformation. H.D. has, in her own words, always been uncanonically seated, resistant to rigid classification; the texture of her work celebrates internal, existential resonances that evidence the emergence of personality. The author capitalizes on this facet of H.D.s work and uncanonically seats her in conversation with the neglected literary theorist, Louise Rosenblatt (19042005), whose transactional contribution uniquely fuses critical theory, politics, philosophy, and educational vision. This book synthesizes the work of H.D. and Rosenblatt to create an emergent personalist theory of literary experience in the quest for wisdom, crystallizing links between philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the politics of human relations. Benefiting from access to unpublished material housed at Columbia, New York, and Yale universities, Vytniorgu combines analysis and theorizing to offer a significant, pedagogically-inflected intervention in literary studies, arguing that university English studies must incorporate critical and pedagogical vantages which open a window on wisdom as well as knowledge.




Gatsby's Oxford


Book Description

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby—war hero and Oxford man—at the beginning of the Jazz Age, when the City of Dreaming Spires attracted an astounding array of intellectuals, including the Inklings, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot. A diverse group of Americans came to Oxford in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Jazz Age—when the Rhodes Scholar program had just begun and the Great War had enveloped much of Europe. Scott Fitzgerald created his most memorable character—Jay Gatsby—shortly after his and Zelda’s visit to Oxford. Fitzgerald’s creation is a cultural reflection of the aspirations of many Americans who came to the University of Oxford. Beginning in 1904, when the first American Rhodes Scholars arrived in Oxford, this book chronicles the experiences of Americans in Oxford through the Great War to the beginning of the Great Depression. This period is interpreted through the pages of The Great Gatsby, producing a vivid cultural history. Archival material covering Scholars who came to Oxford during Trinity Term 1919—when Jay Gatsby claims he studied at Oxford—enables the narrative to illuminate a detailed portrait of what a “historical Gatsby” would have looked like, what he would have experienced at the postwar university, and who he would have encountered around Oxford—an impressive array of artists including W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis.