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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics
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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics Hardback - 2002 - 1st Edition

by L. Higgins

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Reader reviews for The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics

From the publisher

'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 practices. Only the representation of 'ugliness', they protested, would produce the new, truly 'beautiful' work of art. Claiming membership in a cult, however playfully, was a crucial means of group and self-representation and promotion, a defense against personal, socio-economic, and artistic marginalization. Strategically, they dissociated the Beautiful from its traditional, troubling embodiment in female beauty, and from its more recent association with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In effect, the deliberate cultivation of ugliness provided the means to displace the misogyny and homophobia which governed individual and artistic responses and utterances. This feminist argument takes in texts such as John Ruskin's foundational art criticism, Eliot's uncollected literary journalism, Lewis's pro-fascism pamphlets of the 1930s, and the city poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. Analyses of Whistler's paintings and the poetry of W.B. Yeats demonstrate that even those who claimed to be the most vigorous champions of Beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery.

First line

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.

Details

  • Title The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics
  • Author L. Higgins
  • Binding Hardback
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Pages 312
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Palgrave MacMillan
  • Publication date 2002-08-19
  • Features Bibliography, Dust Cover, Index
  • ISBN 9780312240370 / 0312240376
  • Weight 1.07 lbs (0.49 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.54 x 5.58 x 0.94 in (19.15 x 14.17 x 2.39 cm)
  • Category Philosophy
  • Library of Congress subjects Aesthetics, Ugliness
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2001053133
  • Dewey Decimal Code 111.85

Media reviews

Citations

  • Choice, 02/01/2003, Page 983

About the author

LESLEY HIGGINS is an Associate Professor of English at York University, Toronto, Canada.

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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics
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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics

by Higgins, L

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Hardcover. New. New Book; Fast Shipping from UK; Not signed; Not First Edition; Cult of ugliness, Ezra Pounds 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" conditio
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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics
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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics

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Modernist Cult Of Ugliness
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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics

by Lesley Higgins

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness
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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness

by Lesley Higgins

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Modernist Cult Of Ugliness
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