Search Results

This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in Seven Men. The critical tradition has been excessively preoccupied with trying to identify the speakers and ‘originals’ of each section of Mauberley. It argues that, seen in relation to the growing interest in portrait collections, composite portraiture, the disturbances in auto/biography, and imaginary art‐works, this poem sequence can be read as a parody of the forms of literary memoir, through which Pound also explores autobiography.

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.

In this chapter a case-study of caricatures included in periodicals of the early 1890s shows some of the ways in which aspects of same-sex desire were becoming legible to a wider audience before the trials of 1895 in relation to concerns over the alleged masculinisation of women as well as the effeminisation of men. Particular attention is focussed on the work of Max Beerbohm whose satirical texts and caricatures ranged from the indulgently amusing to the grotesque.

This chapter discusses the lives and works of Max Beerbohm and Enoch Soames. Max Beerbohm published an elegant and ingenious short story about literary fame in 1919, while Enoch Soames is a typical poet from the 1890s, outlandishly dressed and devoted to French literature. When Beerbohm meets Soames, Soames confesses his frustration and admits that a great artist's faith in himself, and in the verdict of posterity, is not enough to keep him happy.

The first chapter charts the emerging influence and impact of a travel light ethos from the Edwardian period to modernism. It pays particular attention to the transitional status of the house in Edwardian writing at a time when it was visibly beginning to lose its lustre. The chapter will begin by tracing the genesis of that now-prolific phrase 'house of fiction' to Henry James's belated 1908 Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and will argue that, contrary to popular usage, the 'house of fiction' originally referred to an amorphous structure on the point of abandonment. It will then look at two conflicting responses to the parallel rise of a culture of portability: Max Beerbohm’s ‘Ichabod’ (1900) and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). The chapter will finish by turning to modernist delineations of a portable culture which has become well-established by the late 1910s.

Although Bester spoke disapprovingly of his early career, dismissing all of his stories written before 1950 as juvenilia, he produced several promising works in the early 1940s, most notably “The Probable Man,” “Adam and No Eve,” and “Hell Is Forever.” These stories appeared in leading markets such as Astounding and Unknown but pushed beyond them, at once invoking and subverting the conventions of the standard techno-adventure. This chapter demonstrates that even at this early stage in his career, Bester experimented with SF reading protocols in highly self-conscious ways. It also traces the emergence of key elements of his approach, including the use of hybrid SF-mystery plots, metanarration, metafictional references, the frame story, pastiche, extra-coding, and ambiguous resolutions