Browse

Uncloseting Drama: Modernism's Queer Theatres

Nick Salvato

In this elegant book, modernism is illuminated through little-known but striking works by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others who revived the “closet drama”—plays written largely for private ... More

In this elegant book, modernism is illuminated through little-known but striking works by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others who revived the “closet drama”—plays written largely for private reading—as a means of exploring forbidden sexualities.Less

The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren: Proust's Swedish Valet

Ernest Forssgren

William C. Carter (ed.)

The memoirs of Ernest Forssgren (1894–1970), the young Swede who served as Marcel Proust's last valet, provide new insights into Proust's life and death. Previously, Forssgren's memoir has been ... More

The memoirs of Ernest Forssgren (1894–1970), the young Swede who served as Marcel Proust's last valet, provide new insights into Proust's life and death. Previously, Forssgren's memoir has been published only in excerpts, in French, with serious omissions and alterations. This book presents the complete text of the memoir. Also included here is other new material: the inscriptions that Proust wrote for Forssgren's copy of Swann's Way; an important telegram that Proust sent Forssgren, which defines with greater precision the novelist's activities in the final months of his life; Forssgren's “Summary” of the first English biography of Proust, by George D. Painter, which provides many new details about Proust's last trip to Cabourg in 1914 and his attempts at seducing young men of the servant class; and the notes that Forssgren made in his copy of Painter's biography.Less

Proust in Love

William C. Carter

This book portrays Marcel Proust's amorous adventures and misadventures from adolescence through his adult years, supplying where appropriate Proust's own sensitive, intelligent, and often ... More

This book portrays Marcel Proust's amorous adventures and misadventures from adolescence through his adult years, supplying where appropriate Proust's own sensitive, intelligent, and often disillusioned observations about love and sexuality. Proust is revealed as a man agonizingly caught between the constant fear of public exposure as a homosexual and the need to find and express love. The author also shows how the author's experiences became major themes in his novel In Search of Lost Time. It discusses Proust's adolescent sexual experiences, his disastrous brothel visit to cure homosexual inclinations, and his first great loves. It also addresses the duel Proust fought after the journalist Jean Lorrain alluded to his homosexuality in print, his flirtations with respectable women and high-class prostitutes, and his affairs with young men of the servant class. With new revelations about Proust's love life and a gallery of photographs, the book provides an unprecedented glimpse of Proust's gay Paris.Less

Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry

David Rosen

This book offers a radically new account of Modern poetry and revises our understanding of its relation to Romanticism. British poets from Wordsworth to Auden attempted to present themselves ... More

This book offers a radically new account of Modern poetry and revises our understanding of its relation to Romanticism. British poets from Wordsworth to Auden attempted to present themselves simultaneously as persons of power and as moral voices in their communities. The modern lyric derives its characteristic complexities—psychological, ethical, formal—from the extraordinary difficulty of this effort. The low register of our language—a register of short, concrete, native words arranged in simple syntax—is deeply implicated in this story. The author shows how the peculiar reputation of “plain English” for truthfulness is employed by Modern poets to conceal the rift between their (probably irreconcilable) ambitions for themselves.Less

Paradoxy of Modernism

Robert Scholes

This book intervenes in ongoing discussions about modernism in the arts during the crucial half-century from 1895 to 1945. While critics of and apologists for modernism have defined modern art and ... More

This book intervenes in ongoing discussions about modernism in the arts during the crucial half-century from 1895 to 1945. While critics of and apologists for modernism have defined modern art and literature in terms of binary oppositions—high/low, old/new, hard/soft, poetry/rhetoric—the book contends that these distinctions are in fact confused and misleading. Such oppositions are instances of “paradox”—an apparent clarity that covers real confusion. Closely examining specific literary texts, drawings, critical writings, and memoirs, it seeks to complicate the neat polar oppositions attributed to modernism. The book argues for the rehabilitation of works in the middle ground that have been trivialized in previous evaluations, and fights orthodoxy with such paradoxes as “durable fluff,” “formulaic creativity,” and “iridescent mediocrity.” The book reconsiders major figures like James Joyce while underscoring the value of minor figures and addressing new attention to others rarely studied. It includes twenty-two illustrations of the artworks discussed.Less

The Fruited Plain: Fables for a Postmodern Democracy

Alvin Kernan

The beleaguered Joad family of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath struggled in an era of disappointed dreams and empty pockets. But how might the grandchildren of that Dust Bowl generation fare in today's ... More

The beleaguered Joad family of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath struggled in an era of disappointed dreams and empty pockets. But how might the grandchildren of that Dust Bowl generation fare in today's more promising times? This book sends various descendants of the original Joad family on a postmodern journey out of California and into the excesses of American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The experiences of today's Joads are as hilarious as they are discomfiting: they encounter a world of democracy gone haywire and social institutions in perplexing disarray. In ten satiric episodes, they visit virtually every important American institution—the family, education, religion, art, the military, law courts, sex, science and medicine, politics, and not least television and its advertisements. Unsparing with barbs, the book reveals both the fools and the knaves among us. The book's modern-day Joads find themselves in a distorted world where a surplus of democracy not only fails to free its inhabitants but also makes them vulnerable to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous exploiters.Less