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Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology in The Young and Evil

Sam See, Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat

Christopher Looby and Michael North (eds)

in Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

The Young and Evil’s queerness undergirds its most consummately modernist ambitions: to renovate myth for modern purposes and to create folklore for a burgeoning ethnic community.

Searching for “Authenticity” in Paul Bowles’s Denmark Vesey

Melissa J. De Graaf

in Blackness in Opera

This chapter examines the question of authenticity surrounding Paul Bowles's Denmark Vesey. Featuring music by Bowles set to a libretto by Charles Henri Ford, Denmark Vesey incorporates racial ... More

This chapter examines the question of authenticity surrounding Paul Bowles's Denmark Vesey. Featuring music by Bowles set to a libretto by Charles Henri Ford, Denmark Vesey incorporates racial politics and Marxist allusions. Its language and music emphasize Africanisms and African American folklore, much of it thoroughly researched and, in Bowles and Ford's minds, authentic. This chapter first considers “authentic” representations of blackness in Denmark Vesey before discussing some of the opera's prominent themes, including Love versus Hate and the use of animal masks. It also explores Denmark Vesey's evocation of Communist-style revolution, paying particular attention to the conflicts and the gradual alliance between blacks and the Left as elements that set up the context of the opera. Finally, it analyzes the demise of Denmark Vesey due to the loss of the score and explains how Bowles and Ford achieved a distinctive result in their integration of race and politics as well as their bridging of race and labor unrest of the 1820s and 1930s.Less

Europe in America: Remapping Broken Cultural Lines:View (1940–7) and VVV (1942–4)

Stamatina Dimakopoulou

in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960

This chapter discusses the histories of the View and VVV. Charles Henri Ford's View appeared alongside the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York City, and found its place in the history of ... More

This chapter discusses the histories of the View and VVV. Charles Henri Ford's View appeared alongside the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York City, and found its place in the history of the American ‘little magazine’, along with André Breton's VVV, as the main forum for the exiled Surrealists during the dark years of the Second World War. Surrealism in View encouraged an opening out to mainstream and popular cultures that were elided from the early experiments of the Abstract Expressionists. It is in comparison with View's eclectic ‘favouritism’ that the chapter considers VVV's attempt to relate Surrealism to American concerns.Less

Under the Sign of Negation: William Carlos Williams and Surrealism

in Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal

This chapter examines American poet William Carlos Williams' engagement with surrealism. It explains that Williams is an important figure for many language writers but their reception of his work has ... More

This chapter examines American poet William Carlos Williams' engagement with surrealism. It explains that Williams is an important figure for many language writers but their reception of his work has often been at odds with the canonical representations of it. It compares Williams' The Great American Novel with André Breton's Soluble Fish, which is an example of a surrealist ‘false novel’. This chapter also suggests that the contributions of Williams, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler to the Blues magazine indicates that there is no clear boundary between the orthodox American followers of surrealism and its renegade dissidents.Less