Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: rethinking modernism, remapping the turn of the twentieth century
- 1 Beatrice Webb and the “serious” artist
- 2 Inventing literary tradition, ghosting Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siècle
- 3 The Lost Girl, Tarr, and the “moment” of modernism
- 4 Mapping the middlebrow in Edwardian England
- 5 “Life is not composed of watertight compartments”: the New Age's critique of modernist literary specialization
- Conclusion: modernism and English studies in history
- Select bibliography
- Index
4 - Mapping the middlebrow in Edwardian England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: rethinking modernism, remapping the turn of the twentieth century
- 1 Beatrice Webb and the “serious” artist
- 2 Inventing literary tradition, ghosting Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siècle
- 3 The Lost Girl, Tarr, and the “moment” of modernism
- 4 Mapping the middlebrow in Edwardian England
- 5 “Life is not composed of watertight compartments”: the New Age's critique of modernist literary specialization
- Conclusion: modernism and English studies in history
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
We are sick to death of the assorted panaceas, of the general acquiescence of artists, of their agreement to have perfect manners, and to mention absolutely nothing unpleasant.
Realism in literature has had its run …
The artist has been at peace with his oppressors for long enough. He has dabbled in democracy and he is now done with that folly … The aristocracy of commerce is decaying, the aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service
…
And the public will do well to resent these “new” kinds of art.
Ezra Pound, “The New Sculpture”Ezra Pound's essay for the Egoist on “The New Sculpture” in 1914 provides a useful point of departure for this chapter's consideration of an arena of literary production that the Joyce–Eliot–Pound nexus of modernism obscures entirely from history: the sphere of the middlebrow in Edwardian England. The work of Netta Syrett (1865–1943), a middlebrow writer of feminist women's fiction who published prolifically between 1895 and 1940, will provide the occasion in this chapter to register depth and subtle contrast in a terrain that her avant-garde contemporaries viewed only as a vast, flat wasteland. Before introducing her or looking closely at her work, however, it is helpful to unpack Pound's contribution to the controversy raging in 1914 over Jacob Epstein's sculpture.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922 , pp. 114 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002