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Introduction

Alan Gillis

in Irish Poetry of the 1930s

This brief chapter outlines the predominant stereotype of post-Independent Irish culture as stagnated and insular, and then asks why this might be the case given the highly impressive range of Irish ... More

This brief chapter outlines the predominant stereotype of post-Independent Irish culture as stagnated and insular, and then asks why this might be the case given the highly impressive range of Irish writers wielding manuscripts at the time, including James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, George Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats. It proceeds to provide the rationale for the rest of the book’s structure, indicating that its chosen poems will be read as constellations in which aesthetic forms and historical contradictions awaken to one another.Less

W. B. Yeats: Among the Deepening Shades

Alan Gillis

in Irish Poetry of the 1930s

This chapter begins by arguing that the fact Yeats is hardly associated with the 1930s constitutes a serious blip in literary history, and sets out to rectify this hiatus. It discusses the complexity ... More

This chapter begins by arguing that the fact Yeats is hardly associated with the 1930s constitutes a serious blip in literary history, and sets out to rectify this hiatus. It discusses the complexity of his late verse and symbolism, his arguments with other modernists, his revisionism of Ireland’s recent past, and focuses on his radical idea of ‘tradition’. The chapter offers in-depth interpretations of ‘Vacillation’, ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, aspects of A Vision, ‘The Statues’, ‘Byzantium’, his controversial late ballads, including the ‘Blueshirt’ poems, and ‘Lapis Lazuli’. Reading the aesthetic structure of his philosophy of history in the light of his poetry’s style and form, and vice versa, the chapter locates what it terms ‘inclusive disjunction’ at the heart of his poetic. It delineates the precise form of Yeats’s right-wing nihilism, but also his capacity for envisioning the possibility of transformations towards social harmony. It reads such remorseless dialecticism in the light of ideas from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, arguing that although his conservative politics were worlds apart from theirs, his poetry’s engagement with contradiction and ruptured idealism creates an authentic and multidimensional aesthetic radicalism that has not yet been accounted for.Less

Louis MacNeice: The Living Curve

Alan Gillis

in Irish Poetry of the 1930s

This chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s idea of Louis MacNeice as a vital means of holding Ulster, Ireland, and England within the purview of a single imagination. It argues that such an idea, to be ... More

This chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s idea of Louis MacNeice as a vital means of holding Ulster, Ireland, and England within the purview of a single imagination. It argues that such an idea, to be accurate, must register MacNeice’s extreme antagonism towards Ulster and Ireland. This antagonism is contextualized within the intense culture of propaganda and rising ideological terror throughout the 1930s. Such a context spurs MacNeice’s interest in the relationship between empiricism and abstraction, which is key to his aesthetics. The chapter traces the multifaceted idea of time in his verse and explores his poetry’s simultaneous striving towards representing newness and registering social reality. Focusing on the figuration and musicality of his poems, the centrality of these to his growing political commitment is discussed, moving into a major interpretation of his masterpiece Autumn Journal. His critical treatment of Ireland is then contextualized within his broader concern for the political agency of poetry in general.Less

Wall Street and other casinos

Benjamin J. Cohen and Susan Strange

in Mad Money: with an introduction by Benjamin J. Cohen

Are Wall Street and other stock exchanges a danger to the world economy? What lessons from the 1930s and the 1980s? Is the contagion factor, as in Asia in 1997, a new flaw in the financial system?

President in the Maelstrom: FDR as Public Opinion Theorist

Susan Herbst

in A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion

This chapter reviews various speeches and rhetorical approaches by President Roosevelt in the 1930s, with a focus on his conceptions of the public. While FDR was no doubt one of the more charismatic ... More

This chapter reviews various speeches and rhetorical approaches by President Roosevelt in the 1930s, with a focus on his conceptions of the public. While FDR was no doubt one of the more charismatic and persuasive presidents in American history, he was also one of most intentional when it came to shaping a public to his liking. The chapter reviews some speeches but focuses more intently on confidential conversations with the White House press corps.Less

Interlude: A Depression Needn’t Be So Depressing

Susan Herbst

in A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion

This brief chapter explores how the new "self-help" books of the 1930s tried to both cheer up and make passive an American populace exhausted by the brutal economic downturn. Very popular books ... More

This brief chapter explores how the new "self-help" books of the 1930s tried to both cheer up and make passive an American populace exhausted by the brutal economic downturn. Very popular books promoted self-reliance, even in light of trauma felt by the middle-class reading public.Less

Woolf and the Thirties Poets

Emily Kopley

in Virginia Woolf and Poetry

Studying Woolf’s relationship with the British male poets who first came to public attention in the 1930s clarifies tensions of the time concerning gender, generations, and, especially, literary ... More

Studying Woolf’s relationship with the British male poets who first came to public attention in the 1930s clarifies tensions of the time concerning gender, generations, and, especially, literary form. The poetry of W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, John Lehmann, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender provoked Woolf’s criticism in large part for a reason that has received little attention, Woolf’s competition with poetry. This spirit of competition was not matched by the 1930s poets themselves. While Woolf’s criticism prompted the poets’ counter-arguments, Woolf’s fiction stirred only the young poets’ admiration, and in some cases imagination, both in her lifetime and after. This chapter looks at Woolf’s “A Letter to a Young Poet,” the poets’ response to Woolf in letters, poetry, and criticism, Woolf’s essay “The Leaning Tower” (1941), and the poets’ writing on Woolf after her death.Less

Introduction

Andrea Harris

in Making Ballet American: Modernism Before and Beyond Balanchine

The introduction presents the core historiographical problem that Making BalletAmerican aims to correct: the idea that George Balanchine’s neoclassical choreography represents the first successful ... More

The introduction presents the core historiographical problem that Making BalletAmerican aims to correct: the idea that George Balanchine’s neoclassical choreography represents the first successful manifestation of an “American” ballet. While this idea is pervasive in dance history, little scholarly attention has been paid to its construction. The introduction brings to light an alternative, more complex historical context for American neoclassical ballet than has been previously considered. It places Lincoln Kirstein’s 1933 trip to Paris, famous for bringing Balanchine to the United States, within a transnational and interdisciplinary backdrop of modernism, during a time when the global art world was shifting significantly in response to the international rise of fascism. This context reverberates throughout to the book’s examination of American ballet as a form that was embedded in and responsive to a changing set of social, cultural, and political conditions over the period covered, 1933–1963.Less