Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Anaïs Nin (review)

Biography ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-267
Author(s):  
Susan Pavloska
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Anais Nin

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Hilda Doolittle ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

Twentieth-Century Pathological Writers and Their Creativity

2019 ◽  
pp. 277-295
Author(s):  
Suzette Henke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Psychiatric History ◽  
Traumatic Loss ◽  
Experimental Fiction ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
History Of

Culturally constructed pathologies exhibited by three authors of the modernist period: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, reveal an emotional trajectory from paralyzing depressive or obsessive behavior to explosions of creative genius channeled into experimental fiction. Each of these authors struggled with a personal history of psychological distress evinced by genetic, experiential, or cultural factors and exacerbated by traumatic events in childhood or adolescence. All three sought to handle posttraumatic stress through complex gestures of aesthetic reenactment in a process that might be described as scriptotherapy. Woolf epitomizes the tortured artist grappling with so-called madness. Throughout her canon, she self-consciously struggles with irreconcilable issues of gender, abjection, and mourning. What appears to have been bipolar disorder in Woolf’s own psychiatric history might well have engendered a lifetime of creativity punctuated by severe bouts of debilitating depression. Joyce struggled with a pathological fear of erotic betrayal that spurred an obsessional fascination with adultery and with the enigma of spousal complicity, a drama whose erotic perversities were later played out in his twentieth-century epic novel, Ulysses. D. H. Lawrence proved somewhat notorious for his pathological obsessions with sexual desire, homosocial bonding, erotic loss, and conjugal betrayal. These authors worked through pathological symptoms to convert the seeds of incipient madness into burgeoning works of literary genius. They incorporated the pain of traumatic loss into the triumph of aesthetic integration via the creation of radically innovative and experimental art.

Arabian Aesthetics in European Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-355
Author(s):  
Ferial J. Ghazoul
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Diffusion ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World ◽  
European Modernism

This article focuses on one aspect of the impact of the Arabian Nights on Western literature that has been rarely addressed, namely its impact on modernism. Modernism is almost always viewed as a quintessentially European movement, self-generated between the first and second World Wars. From there it spread to the rest of the world. Despite its global diffusion, the imperial project has remained to be viewed in terms of the impact of the colonial powers over the colonized. My contention is that the cultural traffic was not one-way, but two-way. By considering the cultural traffic as going two ways, we instil an understanding of Modernism as a World Movement and recognize the constitutive part that Arabic poetics played in European Modernism. This article thus detects how the narrative logic of the most famous Arabian tales structured the works of the two pillars of High Modernism, Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document