Dynamic Form : How Intermediality Made Modernism /
Lewis, Cara L.
Dynamic Form : How Intermediality Made Modernism / Cara L. Lewis. - 1 online resource (330 p.) : 28 b&w halftones
Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Reformulating Modernism -- 1. Plastic Form: Henry James’s Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round -- 2. Mortal Form: Still Life and Virginia Woolf ’s Other Elegiac Shapes -- 3. Protean Form: Erotic Abstraction and Ardent Futurity in the Poetry of Mina Loy -- 4. Bad Formalism: Evelyn Waugh’s Film Fictions and the Work of Art in the Age of Cinemechanics -- 5. Surface Forms: Photography and Gertrude Stein’s Contact History of Modernism -- Epilogue: The Consolations of Form -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec
Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment.As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
In English.
9781501749193
10.1515/9781501749193 doi
2019040743
Amerian literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Art and literature--History--Great Britain--20th century.
Art and literature--History--United States--20th century.
English literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Formalism (Art)--History.
Formalism (Literary analysis)--History.
Literary form--History--20th century.
Modernism (Art)--Great Britain.
Modernism (Art)--United States.
Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.
Modernism (Literature)--United States.
Art History.
Literary Studies.
Photography.
Photography / History.
modernism, visual arts, media, literary form, art in literature.
PR478.M6 / L49 2020 PR478.M6 / L49 2021
820.9/0092
Dynamic Form : How Intermediality Made Modernism / Cara L. Lewis. - 1 online resource (330 p.) : 28 b&w halftones
Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Reformulating Modernism -- 1. Plastic Form: Henry James’s Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round -- 2. Mortal Form: Still Life and Virginia Woolf ’s Other Elegiac Shapes -- 3. Protean Form: Erotic Abstraction and Ardent Futurity in the Poetry of Mina Loy -- 4. Bad Formalism: Evelyn Waugh’s Film Fictions and the Work of Art in the Age of Cinemechanics -- 5. Surface Forms: Photography and Gertrude Stein’s Contact History of Modernism -- Epilogue: The Consolations of Form -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec
Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment.As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
In English.
9781501749193
10.1515/9781501749193 doi
2019040743
Amerian literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Art and literature--History--Great Britain--20th century.
Art and literature--History--United States--20th century.
English literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Formalism (Art)--History.
Formalism (Literary analysis)--History.
Literary form--History--20th century.
Modernism (Art)--Great Britain.
Modernism (Art)--United States.
Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.
Modernism (Literature)--United States.
Art History.
Literary Studies.
Photography.
Photography / History.
modernism, visual arts, media, literary form, art in literature.
PR478.M6 / L49 2020 PR478.M6 / L49 2021
820.9/0092

