The modernist cult of ugliness : aesthetic and gender politics / Lesley Higgins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Higgins, Lesley, 1955-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ugliness.

Aesthetics.

Physical Description:

xvi, 312 pages, 6 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, N.Y. : Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Summary:

"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 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.

Contents:

Chapter 1 The Trials of Beauty: Ruskin, Whistler, and a "New Series of Truths" 25

Chapter 2 No Time for Pater: Breaking the Homophobic Silence 79

Chapter 3 Diagnosis, Hate, and Masculine Difference: Delineating the "Cult of Ugliness" 121

Chapter 4 "O City City": Gendered Topographies in Modern American Poetry 159.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [279]-303) and index.

ISBN:

0312240376

OCLC:

47973390