H.D. and the Victorian fin de siècle : gender, modernism, decadence / Cassandra Laity.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Laity, Cassandra, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 104.

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 104

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886-1961--Knowledge--Literature.

H. D.

Women and literature--English-speaking countries--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Decadence (Literary movement)--Great Britain.

Decadence (Literary movement).

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

Modernism (Literature).

American poetry--English influences.

American poetry.

Sex (Psychology) in literature.

Gender identity in literature.

Aestheticism (Literature).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xix, 215 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Other Title:

H. D. & the Victorian Fin de Siècle

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

H. D and the Victorian Fin de Siecle argues foremost that H. D. eluded the male modernist flight from Romantic 'effeminacy' and 'personality' by embracing the very cults of personality in the Decadent Romanticism of Oscar Wilde, A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and D. G. Rossetti that her male contemporaries most deplored: the cult of the demonic femme fatale and of the 'effeminate' Aesthete androgyne. H. D., Laity maintains, used these sexually aggressive masks to shape a female modernism that freely engaged female and male androgyny, homoeroticism, narcissism and maternal eroticism. Focusing on the early Sea Garden, the plays and poetry of the 1920s and her late epic Trilogy, H. D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle demonstrates H. D.'s shift from the homoerotic 'white', vanishing tropology of the male androgyne fashioned by Pater and Wilde to the 'abject' monstrously sexual body of the Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent femme fatale.

Contents:

Introduction: Dramatis Personae: The Aesthete Androgyne and the Femme Fatale

1. The Rhetoric of Anti-Romanticism: Gendered Genealogies of Male Modernism

2. H.D.'s Early Decadent Masks and Images: HER; Sea Garden

3. Writing the Decadent Boy Androgyne: Whiteness, Diaphaneite, Poikilia, and Male Statuary

4. Across Gender, across Sexuality: H.D.'s Male Masking and the Sexual Narrative: Hippolytus Temporizes; "Heliodora"

5. Toward a Revised Myth of Origins: From the Diaphanous Androgyne to the Abject Femme Fatale

6. From Agon to "Heros Fatale": Pre-Raphaelite Transformations of Male Modernism/Modernity

7. Feminine Abjection and Trilogy.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-210) and index.

ISBN:

0-511-58565-9

0-511-00386-2