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Chapter 22 - Dance
- from Part IV - Arts
- Edited by Julian Onderdonk, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, Ceri Owen, University of Birmingham
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- Book:
- Vaughan Williams in Context
- Published online:
- 28 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 04 April 2024, pp 188-195
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Summary
This chapter situates Vaughan Williams’s involvement with dance in a capacious network of literary, theatrical, choreographic, and visual associations. Dance – performed (such as ballet and modern solos) and participatory (such as folk dance and other forms of social dance) – is crucial to understanding conscious and subconscious efforts at cultural renewal in interwar Britain, efforts that in turn should be understood as a response to the devastation of the First World War and as part of the story of modernist experimentation. In this context, Vaughan Williams’s important composition for the ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing, first staged in 1931, having been premiered in Norwich as a concert work the year before, was a crucial contribution to interwar dance history. Job’s context is the vibrant, formative, intensely experimental interwar period of twentieth-century British dance history. Job belongs to what cultural historian Susan Jones calls ‘an important transitional moment in British dance’; new experiments in collaborative theatre and dance stirred excitement, and Job was staged amidst a creative ferment that intermingled British and continental artists and visions. Job shared with much experimental interwar British theatre a focus on daring and provocative experiments with dance drama as cultural commentary.
Katherine Mansfield in a Global Context
- from REVIEW ESSAY
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- By Rishona Zimring, English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon
- Edited by Galya Diment, University of Washington, Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, Martin W. Todd
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- Book:
- Katherine Mansfield and Russia
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 28 July 2017, pp 201-213
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Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber (eds), Katherine Mansfield's French Lives (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 280 pp., L72. ISBN 978 90 04 28368 8
Kirsty Gunn, My Katherine Mansfield Project (Devon: Notting Hill Editions, 2015), 148 pp., L14.99. ISBN 978 1 910749 04 3
Andrew Harrison, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 472 pp., L60. ISBN 978 0 470 65478 1
Peter J. Kalliney, Modernism in a Global Context (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 190 pp., L21.99. ISBN 978 1 4725 6965 3
Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (eds), The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 4: The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield Including Miscellaneous Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 520 pp., L175. ISBN 9780748685059
Caroline Maclean, The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain 1900–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 240 pp., L70. ISBN 978 0 7486 4729 3
Lucy McDiarmid, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 240 pp., L25. ISBN 978 0 19 872278 6
All of the works gathered here contribute to conversations about transnational modernism. Some bear directly on Mansfield's life and work, while others mention Mansfield or provide important contexts for her literary achievement. In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire, Saikat Majumdar, drawing on Claire Tomalin's biography of Mansfield, writes of New Zealand as the ‘most extreme margin of empire’ (75). That position of extreme marginality helps shape recent understandings of Mansfield's work as modernist in a ‘global context’. For Majumdar, the defining emotion and aesthetic qualities of that extreme margin are boredom and banality. Majumdar argues that the edge of empire produces dichotomies: between barrenness and plenitude, colonial backwater and metropolitan eventfulness. The infertile here produces longing for the promising there. ‘There’ would be the modern metropolis: in particular for Mansfield, London and Paris. The margins of Western modernity create subjects for whom the relentless drive is towards the city; Majumdar is hardly the first, nor will he be the last, to observe this metropolitan allure.
The books under consideration here allow us to ponder a range of situations in which this dynamic plays out or needs to be rethought. Some modernists, of course, fervently sought out the margin, in reaction against the centre.
Rishona Zimring: H. S. Ede, Savage Messiah: A Biography of the Sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
- from REVIEWS
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- By Rishona Zimring, Lewis and Clarke College, Portland
- Edited by Claire Davison, Gerri Kimber, W. Todd Martin
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- Book:
- Katherine Mansfield and Translation
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 23 September 2015, pp 191-193
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This magnificently produced republication of Ede's biography, originally published in 1931, is a valuable resource for Mansfield scholars seeking to situate her life and work within cross-disciplinary and transnational modernist networks and collaborations. A contributor to Rhythm, a friend of Mansfield and Murry, and the occasion for Mansfield's admiration and hostility, Gaudier is a fascinating figure in Mansfield's life and artistic milieu. Ede's biography of the artist he admired but never knew is itself a remarkable artifact in the reception history of modernism, plunging its reader into the passionate work of recuperation and recovery of this influential figure. As the co-editors, Sebastiano Barassi and Jon Wood, write in their foreword, by 1927 ‘Gaudier was slowly fading into obscurity’ (4), pace Ezra Pound's immortalisation of the sculptor in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916). Much of Gaudier's work and possessions after his 1915 death in World War One were acquired by Ede in his capacity as Tate Gallery curator in 1926, including almost one thousand hand-written pages of memoir by Gaudier's bereft, ailing companion, Sophie Brzeska. Co-editor Evelyn Silber, the most prominent scholar of Gaudier's work, contributes an essay to this volume in which she explains Ede's sources and how the curator recovered Gaudier's life through these pages and correspondence, written in French, English and Polish. Silber describes the ‘vivid conversational style and emotional rawness’ of this writing, which provided Ede with the opportunity ‘of eavesdropping on [the couple's] lives and innermost thoughts’ (256).
Readers of this volume have renewed access to Ede's own ardent recovery of Gaudier's life, as he turned from his professional role as art historian and curator to the more experimental role of biographer, creating what Barassi and Wood describe as a well-researched ‘fiction’ from Sophie's manuscripts and correspondence (255). Barassi, Wood and Silber provide extraordinarily meticulous and thorough explanatory footnotes and essays, a chronology, a catalogue of source materials, and lavish illustrative materials. The visual works include full-colour plates of Gaudier's sketches, drawings, paintings and designs, as well as reproductions of all eight cover designs for successive editions of Savage Messiah. These covers, too, tell a story about modernism's reception history over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
2 - Making a Scene: Rhys and the Aesthete at Mid-Century
- from PART I - Rhys and Modernist Aesthetics
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- By Rishona Zimring, Lewis and Clark College
- Edited by Erica Johnson, Patricia Moran
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- Book:
- Jean Rhys
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 21 June 2015, pp 40-58
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Jazz is the new art of the unconscious.
Philip Larkin, ‘The Art of Jazz’ (1940)It's a smoky kind of voice […]
Jean Rhys, ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (1962)It's not a hopeless dream that one day soon there might exist a small troupe of readers as aesthetically literate as the people who listen to music at concerts and on the radio.
Brigid Brophy, Prancing Novelist (1973)Rhys's ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (originally published in 1962) implies that in spite of its distortion, appropriation and commodification by the forces of mass entertainment and leisure, jazz music retains the power to create intensely meaningful private acoustic spaces. Private acoustic space also describes a defining characteristic of modernist subjectivism, or, in spatial terms, interiority. Rhys shares with other post-World War II English writers a preoccupation with music scenes as inspirations for modernist interiority. Put rather starkly, music's power to inspire introspection and withdrawal, rather than connection and/or movement, encouraged some writers, including Rhys, to experiment with a character – the listener – who was also a modernist and aesthete. Rhys joins Philip Larkin and Brigid Brophy in this essay so as to encourage an exploration of their shared, if varied, fascination with the effects of midtwentieth- century music scenes on a listener's selfhood and sociability.
This essay proposes that Philip Larkin, Jean Rhys and Brigid Brophy wrote representations of modern listeners that contribute to new understandings of modernist aesthetics and cultural politics in the second half of the twentieth century. To place Rhys in the company of Larkin and Brophy is to nudge her postwar reputation away from the Caribbean orientation of Wide Sargasso Sea into a new frame of reference that positions her on the map of postwar (that is, post-World War II) English culture, a ‘shrinking island’, to be sure, but also a remarkably musical one. Rhys's twenty-first-century importance includes her postwar short fiction's explorations of the music scene. Along with Larkin and Brophy, Rhys used modernism's aestheticism and experiments with interiority (such as depth psychology, inner monologue, stream of consciousness, free indirect discourse and fascination with symbolism and the unconscious) to investigate the modern listener's complex subjective experience of music. Private acoustic space within the music scene suggests a somewhat controversial (especially in Larkin's case) identity: the music connoisseur.
“No Room for More”: Woolf's Journey from London to Scotland, 1938
- from BORDER CROSSINGS AND LIMINAL LANDSCAPES
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- By Rishona Zimring, Lewis and Clark College
- Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans, Sarah E. Cornish
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- Book:
- Woolf and the City
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2010, pp 161-166
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Woolf wrote evocatively to the painter Duncan Grant that in her account of her trip in 1938 to the Scottish Highlands there was “no room for more” (L6 3409: 27 June), stamping her experience with the inevitable brevity of the postcard she was writing and at the same time suggesting perhaps that the Highlands should remain as they are, that is, relatively empty. Such, I suggest, is the aesthetic need of a Woolf who by 1938 was not the celebrant of urban wandering she was in the carnivalesque and festive “Street Haunting” (1927) or the more uproariously joyful passages through the city of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), such as Elizabeth's breezy bus trip. Woolf's trip to Scotland has gone unremarked in Woolf criticism, and in David Bradshaw's introduction to the Oxford edition of To the Lighthouse (1927), makes no appearance in an otherwise detailed account of all that Scotland might have meant to Woolf. In an effort to link Woolf's representation of Scotland to that novel's purported critique of imperialism, Bradshaw leads readers away from an investigation of how Scotland's empty spaces nurtured the later Woolf's creative imagination. Her insistence on preserving Scotland's emptiness in turn seems to cast the urbanized landscape as rather more problematic and indeed damaging than has recently been acknowledged in Woolf criticism, which has sought to ally the city with a progressive feminist consciousness that rejects the association of “woman” with “nature.” This paper explores Woolf's 1938 journey to Scotland as a confrontation with an aesthetics of emptiness apparently in tension with her struggles (in The Years [1937] for example) to continue valuing the agitations of city life.
Biographers touch briefly on Virginia and Leonard Woolf's driving trip from London to the Isle of Skye between June 16 and July 2, 1938. Herbert Marder, in The Measure of Life, presents it as a vacation from the pressures of receiving reviews of the controversial Three Guineas (1938). Having written a book interpreted as a harsh attack on patriotism in a climate of impending international tension (Hitler invaded Austria in March of that year), Woolf now visited a northern landscape charged with meaning, where she meditated on the conflict between Roman invaders and Scottish marauders while sitting on Hadrian's wall, reading Greek poetry in translation.
Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment
- Sandra M. Gilbert, R. Howard Bloch, Patricia Ann Carter, Benjamin Elwood, Sander L. Gilman, Cheryl Glenn, Robert J. Griffin, John D. Guillory, Jane Harper, April Knutson, Norris J. Lacy, George Levine, Herbert Lindenberger, Frederick W. Luciani, J. Lawrence Mitchell, Victoria A. Smallman, Anne Bradford Warner, Rishona Zimring
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 113 / Issue 5 / October 1998
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 1154-1187
- Print publication:
- October 1998
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