Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: The modernist latecomer and ‘permanent novelty’
- Chapter 1 ‘Changing the changing’: Wyndham Lewis and the new modernist ascendancy
- Chapter 2 Laura Riding, modernist fashion and the individual talent
- Chapter 3 The immolation of the artist: Henry Miller and the ‘hot-house geniuses’
- Chapter 4 Investing in the modernist legacy: Objectivist adventures in the ‘Pound tradition’
- Chapter 5 The last word: or how to bring modernism to an end
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 2 - Laura Riding, modernist fashion and the individual talent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 June 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: The modernist latecomer and ‘permanent novelty’
- Chapter 1 ‘Changing the changing’: Wyndham Lewis and the new modernist ascendancy
- Chapter 2 Laura Riding, modernist fashion and the individual talent
- Chapter 3 The immolation of the artist: Henry Miller and the ‘hot-house geniuses’
- Chapter 4 Investing in the modernist legacy: Objectivist adventures in the ‘Pound tradition’
- Chapter 5 The last word: or how to bring modernism to an end
- Notes
- Index
Summary
‘Whole is by breaking and by mending.’
Laura (Riding) Jackson, ‘Autobiography of the Present’Like Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding saw problems inherent in the very existence of an institutionalized modernist revolution, leading to an artless society. There are astonishing similarities between the kind of criticism produced by both writers between 1927 and 1934, with both of them aware the modernist project had succeeded but also intent on identifying where it had gone too far, or not far enough – sometimes in very similar terms. Still, there are differences between them as well, not the least of which was Lewis being two decades older than Riding. While there is evidence that Riding, early in her career, might have envisioned her seamless entry into the modernist ascendancy – with acclaim coming her way from poetic circles orbiting the cultural centre of T. S. Eliot in the early 1920s – she was never as near the centre of high modernism as Lewis, even in the latecomer phase of his career. And although they share a distaste for official literary history, for the group mentality, for the officially sanctioned version of change or revolution, Riding considered Lewis too much of a high modernist himself to see him as a potential ally.
Riding's opposition to the high modernist institution would stem much more from a disapproval of systems and institutions in general than Lewis's disapproval of the single system, the time-mind, instituted by his contemporaries.
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- Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New , pp. 77 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009