Date of Award
2006
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
English
Supervisor
Dr. Leon Surette
Second Advisor
Dr. Stephen Adams
Abstract
Aesthetic modernism’s discourse of culture notoriously entrammeled itself in radical conservative politics in the interwar years. Engaging modernism as a historical and cultural phenomenon, this study examines key interventions in cultural discourse by T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. The Introduction explores the intermingling of power and culture encoded in German Kulturkritik. Chapter One situates the contested dialogue between Vorticism and Italian Futurism as foundational for the modernist cultural politics that emerged in the avant guerre. Chapter Two discusses Eliot’s Christian-informed attempt to generate a creative dialogue between religious, cultural and political forces in After Strange Gods (1934) and Woolf’s pacifist-feminist polemic against Fascism in Three Guineas (1938). Chapter Three examines Lewis’ complex politics-in-culture embedded in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Hitler (1931) and The Hitler Cult (1939). Chapter Four investigates Pound’s effort to articulate a political, economic and aesthetic cultural model for a new civilization in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935) and Guide to Kulchur (1938). The study complicates the common view that modernism, political conservatism and authoritarianism are coextensive.
Recommended Citation
Araujo, Anderson D., "INTO THE VORTEX: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF ELIOT, WOOLF, LEWIS, AND POUND, 1914-1939" (2006). Digitized Theses. 4945.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4945