The Modernist Party
Kate McLoughlin
Abstract
Modernist literature likes a good party. Mrs. Ramsay drowns in anguish at the dinner-party she gives in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Death visits Mrs. Dalloway’s evening-party and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’. For Eliot’s Prufrock, preparing to go to a tea-party induces intense performance anxiety. Politics and old memories sour the dinner-dance in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Cruelties and embarrassments are served up at Madame Verdurin’s soirées in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Extraordinary qualities are required to manage the deteriorating situation at the breakfast-party in For ... More
Modernist literature likes a good party. Mrs. Ramsay drowns in anguish at the dinner-party she gives in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Death visits Mrs. Dalloway’s evening-party and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’. For Eliot’s Prufrock, preparing to go to a tea-party induces intense performance anxiety. Politics and old memories sour the dinner-dance in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Cruelties and embarrassments are served up at Madame Verdurin’s soirées in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Extraordinary qualities are required to manage the deteriorating situation at the breakfast-party in Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not…. Parties also played an enormous role in the intellectual culture of Modernism. A party thrown by Amy Lowell in London in 1914, attended by Ezra Pound, Ford, H.D., Richard Aldington and others, culminated in an argument over the nature of Imagism. In May 1922, Sidney and Violet Schiff brought together at a party at the Hôtel Majestic, Paris, Proust, Joyce, Picasso and Stravinsky: an unrepeatable interaction between modernism’s leading figures. In The Modernist Party, twelve internationally distinguished scholars explore the party both as a literary device and as a forum for developing modernist creative values, opening up new perspectives on networking, materiality, the everyday and concepts of space, place and time.
Keywords:
Modernism,
Parties,
Networks,
The everyday,
Space and place,
Intellectual culture,
Materiality
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780748647316 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: September 2013 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647316.001.0001 |