"Cult of ugliness," Ezra Pound’s phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme—the self-styled "Men of 1914"—responded to the "horrid or sordid or disgusting" conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practice. Only the representation of "ugliness," they protested, would produce the new, truly "beautiful" work of art. They dissociated the beautiful from its traditional embodiment in female beauty, and from its association with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Their cultivation of ugliness displaced misogyny and homophobia. Higgins takes in texts such as John Ruskin’s art criticism, Eliot’s literary journalism, Lewis’s pro-fascism pamphlets, and the poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. She demonstrates that even vigorous champions of beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery.
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"This book offers a refreshing revision of modernist aesthetics, premised upon a 'cult of ugliness.' [Higgins] renews attention to the politics of reading modernisms, and indeed deploys and admirable model of feminist reading both along and against the grain." -- Bonnie Kime Scott, San Diego State University
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Lesley Higgins is Associate Professor of English at York University.
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
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A brilliant artist praised for "inaugurating a revolution, leading intransigent youth against the strongholds of tradition and academic complacence" (Fry 1903:345) but also known for his irascible temperament and timely barbs lashes out at an eminent critic (once, the chief proponent and defender of "new" art) who has trashed the artist's work, in writing, as a deliberate and very public affront. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, The Waste Land, Modern Painters, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, African American, Ezra Pound, New England, Four Quartets, Men Without Art, Ten O'Clock Lecture, Helene Johnson, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, The Gentle Art, Ellis Island, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henry James, Marius the Epicurean, The Falling Rocket, Alfred Prufrock, Angelina Weld, John Ruskin, Langston Hughes, New Jersey New!
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
A brilliant artist praised for "inaugurating a revolution, leading intransigent youth against the strongholds of tradition and academic complacence" (Fry 1903:345) but also known for his irascible temperament and timely barbs lashes out at an eminent critic (once, the chief proponent and defender of "new" art) who has trashed the artist's work, in writing, as a deliberate and very public affront. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, The Waste Land, Modern Painters, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, African American, Ezra Pound, New England, Four Quartets, Men Without Art, Ten O'Clock Lecture, Helene Johnson, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, The Gentle Art, Ellis Island, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henry James, Marius the Epicurean, The Falling Rocket, Alfred Prufrock, Angelina Weld, John Ruskin, Langston Hughes, New Jersey New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 163
books:
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3
books
cite this book:
- Marius the Epicurean (Oxford World's Classics) by Walter Pater on 9 pages
- Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: And Other Poems by T. S. Eliot on 4 pages
- Blasting and Bombardiering by Wyndham Lewis on 4 pages
- Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T. S. Eliot in Front Matter, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Notes on language and style by T. E Hulme on page 145, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
See all 163 books this book cites
- The Fin-de-Siecle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s by Joseph Bristow in Front Matter
- Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism by Jude V. Nixon in Front Matter
- Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (British Authors Series, 1880-1920) by Laurel Brake in Back Matter
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