The Geometry of Modernism
The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats
Miranda B. Hickman(Author)
University of Texas Press
Published on 1. January 2006
Book
Hardback
358 pages
978-0-292-70943-0 (ISBN)
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Description
Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism-and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work.
Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.
Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Austin, TX
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
With dust jacket
Illustrations
17 b&w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
735 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-292-70943-0 (9780292709430)
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Book
01/2006
University of Texas Press
€42.90
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Persons
MIRANDA HICKMAN is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal.
Content
* List of Illustrations * List of Abbreviations * Preface * Acknowledgments * Permissions and Sources * Introduction *1. Wyndham Lewis, Vorticism, and the Campaign against Wildean Effeminacy *2. A Vorticist Renaissance? Ezra Pound, the Geometric "Clean Line," and Fascist Italy *3. "Embodied... in Square and Cube and Rectangle": H.D. and the Vorticist Body *4. "Mystic Geometry": The Visionary Texts of Yeats and H.D. * Epilogue * Notes * Bibliography * Index