The Modernist Party

The Modernist Party book cover

The Modernist Party

Author(s): Kate McLoughlin (Author, Editor)

  • Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
  • Publication Date: 5 Mar. 2013
  • Language: English
  • Print length: 240 pages
  • ISBN-10: 0748647317
  • ISBN-13: 9780748647316

Book Description

Leading international scholars explore the party’s significance to Modernism. Have you ever been struck by the number of parties in Modernist literature? Mrs. Ramsay drowns in anguish at the dinner-party she gives in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Death is a guest in Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party. Politics sour the evening party in Joyce’s The Dead. Have you also noticed the role played by parties in the public intellectual culture of Modernism? A party held in London by Amy Lowell on 17 July 1914, attended by Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and Richard Aldington, degenerated into an argument over the nature of Imagism. On 18 May 1922, Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev met at a post-ballet party at Paris’ Hotel Majestic: an unrepeatable encounter between Modernism’s leading figures. In The Modernist Party, internationally distinguished scholars explore the party both as a literary device and as a social setting in which the movement’s creative values were developed. It develops the concept of space, currently of central concern to Modernist scholars. It explores the tensions between Modernism as an aesthetics of intensity and Modernism as a movement of the everyday. It adds a new and vital area of research to investigations of Modernism as the product of intellectual and social networks.

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Book Description

Leading international scholars illuminate the party’s significance in Modernism

From the Back Cover

‘I really like the idea of treating the party as a site of modernist invention and contention.’ Sean Latham, University of Tulsa ‘Intriguing. There should be more fun in Modernist Studies.’ David Trotter, University of Cambridge Leading international scholars illuminate the party’s significance in Modernism In 12 chapters internationally distinguished scholars explore the party both as a literary device and as a forum for developing modernist creative values, opening up new perspectives on materiality, the everyday and concepts of space, place and time. There are chapters on Conrad and domestic parties, T S Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, the party vector in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Finnegans Wake, Katherine Mansfield’s party stories, Virginia Woolf’s idea of a party, the textual parties of Proust, Ford Madox Ford and Aldous Huxley and the real-life parties of Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, the black ‘after-party’ of the Harlem Renaissance and the parties in extremis in D H Lawrence’s Women in Love. Like guests at a party, the chapters talk to and argue with each other. They contribute different approaches: formal, historical, thematic, biographical and theoretical. They address gender and sexuality, race, genre, class, sociality and privacy. And they establish critical viewpoints. The party is shown to be the site both of introspection and self-display. It provokes competition, collaboration and violence. It is an occasion of nihilism as well as a model for creative production. Kate McLoughlin is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Martha Gellhorn: The War Writer in the Field and in the Text (2007) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009).

About the Author

Kate McLoughlin is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birkbeck, University of London.

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