Sex Theories And The Shaping Of Two Moderns

This book examines the impact of scientific and sexologic theories on the creation of character in the prose of two moderns, Hemingway and H.D.

This book examines the impact of scientific and sexologic theories on the creation of character in the prose of two moderns, Hemingway and H.D.

In their literary autobiographies, modernists Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) challenge the scientific figures of the perverse lesbian, particularly those promulgated by Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. By multiplying their 'I's, manipulating subject and object divisions, undermining boundaries between writer and audience, and using repetition to code erotic moments, these writers queer the terms of autobiography. That queering requires understanding autobiography as more institutional than introspective, and the autobiographies themselves question the very theories that determine them: theories of lesbianism, female development, and memory.

In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as “the Papin affair,” the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacan’s effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and H.D.’s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century films—including Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the “psychotic lesbian” repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected.

"Electra's story is essentially a tale of murder, revenge, and violence. In the ancient myth of Atreus, Agamemnon returns home from battle and receives no hero's welcome. Instead, he is greeted with an ax, murdered in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover-accomplice, Aegisthus. Electra chooses anger over sorrow and stops at nothing to ensure that her mother pays. In revenge, Electra, with the help of her brother, orchestrates a brutal and bloody matricide, and her reward is the restitution of her father's good name. Amid all this chaos, Electra, Agamemnon's princess daughter, must bear the humiliation of being treated as a slave girl and labeled a madwoman."—from the IntroductionAlmost everyone knows about Oedipus and his mother, and many readers would put the Oedipus myth at the forefront of Western collective mythology. In Electra after Freud, Jill Scott leaves that couple behind and argues convincingly for the primacy of the countermyth of Agamemnon and his daughter. Through a lens of Freudian and feminist psychoanalysis, this book views renderings of the Electra myth in twentieth-century literature and culture.Scott reads several pivotal texts featuring Electra to demonstrate what she calls "a narrative revolt" against the dominance of Oedipus as archetype. Situating the Electra myth within a framework of psychoanalysis, medicine, opera, and dance, Scott investigates the heroine's role at the intersections of history and the feminine, eros and thanatos, hysteria and melancholia. Scott analyzes Electra adaptations by H.D., Hofmannsthal and Strauss, Musil, and Plath and highlights key moments in the telling and reception of the Electra myth in the modern imagination.

Modernism, Sex, and Gender is an up-to-date and in-depth review of how theories of gender and sexuality have shaped the way modernism has been read and interpreted from its inception to the present day. The volume explores four key aspects of modernist literature and criticism that have contributed to the new modernist studies: women's contributions to modernism; masculinities; sexuality; and the intersection of gender and sexuality with politics and law. Including brief case studies of such writers as May Sinclair and Radclyffe Hall, this book is a valuable guide for those looking to understand the history of critical thought on gender and sexuality in modernist studies today.

The angel can be viewed as a signal reference to modernist attempts to accommodate religious languages to self-consciously modern cultures. This book uses the angel to explore the relations between modernist literature and early twentieth-century debates over the secular and/or religious character of the modern age.

This is a literary biography of Richard Aldington, founding member of the Imagist Movement, poet of the First World War, author of 'Death of a Hero' and a biography of D.H. Lawrence. Aldington's is an extraordinary human story dealing with contemporary issues, such as confrontation of sexual mores of the day and the impact of his soldier experience on his life and work. There hasn't been a recent biography of Aldington, the only one of the war poets not to have one. With the interest in the First World War increasing as we near the centenary, the time is right for this book. This biography explores the relationships of Aldington with other prominent literary figures: Ezra Pound, Herbert Read, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and his unsuccessful marriage with H.D. This first instalment of a hopefully two-volume biography covers Aldington's life and work up to 1929. It investigates the years 1911-1915 in which Aldington helped found Modernism and formed relationships with other Modernists, the years 1916-19 when his life fell apart after his soldier experience, the years 1920-28 when he tried to re-establish his literary career, laid the foundations of modern literary criticism, and his writing of Death of a Hero at the end of the decade, a blistering attack on all that had made the war possible. Offical Blurb: The story of Richard Aldington, outstanding Imagist poet and author of the bestselling war novel, Death of a Hero (1929), takes place against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent and creative years of the twentieth century. Vivien Whelpton provides a remarkably detailed and sensitive portrayal of the writer from early adolescence. His life as a stalwart of the pre-war London literary scene, as a soldier, and in the difficult aftermath of the First World War is deftly rendered through a careful and detailed analysis of the novels, poems and letters of the writer himself and his close circle of acquaintance. The complexities of London's Bohemia, with its scandalous relationships, social grandstanding and incredible creative output, are masterfully untangled, and the spotlight placed firmly on the talented group of poets christened by Ezra Pound as 'Imagistes'. The author demonstrates profound psychological insight into Aldington's character and childhood in her nuanced analysis of his post-war survivor's guilt, and consideration of the three most influential women in his life: his wife, the gifted American poet, H.D.; Dorothy Yorke, the woman he left her for; and Brigit Patmore, his brilliant and fascinating older mistress.Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover vividly reveals Aldington's warm and passionate nature and the vitality which characterised his life and works, concluding with his triumphant personal and literary resurrection with the publication of Death of a Hero.