The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats (Literary Modernism Series) - Hardcover

Hickman, Miranda B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292709439 ISBN 13: 9780292709430

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2006

Synopsis

Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism-and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work. Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.

About this title

About the Author:

MIRANDA HICKMAN is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0292709439
• ISBN 13: 9780292709430
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 358