“When a woman speaks the truth about her body”: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the challenges of lesbian auto/biography

As professionals who encountered first-hand the invidious barriers within patriarchal society that hindered career women, Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf both used their published writings to pursue lifelong crusades against the under-representation of females in their respective disciplines. This article compares the different strategies by which the two artists strove to tell the truth about their experiences as women, and considers the corresponding implications for Smyth’s musical output. While the egotistical Smyth candidly recounted stories relating to herself, Woolf excised overt authorial presence from her texts, instead invoking fictitious, protean narrators to reflect the collective unconsciousness of Womanhood. Woolf’s encouragement and criticism of Smyth’s literary endeavours are examined in the context of her biographical theories and feminist critiques, and of the lesbian proclivities of both women. Their published writings and personal documents suggest that Smyth actively appealed to the very autobiographical strategies that Woolf persistently counselled her to subvert, in order to compete with the (heterosexual) patriarchy on equal terms. She apparently held this option to be the only available one through which to insinuate herself within the canonical traditions specific to music, as distinct from those of literature

Korney Chukovsky in Britain

Korney Chukovsky is a neglected figure in the story of the British reception of Russian literature. This essay attempts to recover his place in the complex networks of translation, criticism, and interpretation in the twentieth century by examining his three visits to Britain (1903-4, 1916, and 1962), his activities as an intermediary for British writers in Russia, and the British dissemination of his literary criticism.In his alternate guises as indigent newspaper correspondent, feted member of a wartime delegation, and recipient of an Oxford honorary doctorate, Chukovsky came to be both a key contributor to and a keen observer of British perceptions of Russian literature. </jats:p

Walter Williams Library

Walter Williams (1864-1935) was President of the University of Missouri from 1930-1935 and served as Dean of the School of Journalism from its founding in 1908. The Alumni Association of the School of Journalism established the library in 1934 and presented it to Dr. Williams for installation in the President's House on the University of Missouri campus. The library's original purpose was to house the best contemporary books, and additional selections for the library were made in May 1935. The Alumni Association requested that each of the authors include a dedication addressed to Walter Williams and/or the students of the University. According to the original plan for the collection, the books were later transferred to Ellis Library. Those books containing letters or autographs were moved into the Rare Book Collection

Modernism and Misogyny in Arnold Schoenberg's Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Opus 15

abstract: Arnold Schoenberg's 1908-09 song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten [The Book of the Hanging Gardens], opus 15, represents one of his most decisive early steps into the realm of musical modernism. In the midst of personal and artistic crises, Schoenberg set texts by Stefan George in a style he called "pantonality," and described his composition as radically new. Though stylistically progressive, however, Schoenberg's musical achievement had certain ideologically conservative roots: the composer numbered among turn-of-the-century Viennese artists and thinkers whose opposition to the conventional and the popular--in favor of artistic autonomy and creativity--concealed a reactionary misogyny. A critical reading of Hanging Gardens through the lens of gender reveals that Schoenberg, like many of his contemporaries, incorporated strong frauenfeindlich [anti-women] elements into his work, through his modernist account of artistic creativity, his choice of texts, and his musical settings. Although elements of Hanging Gardens' atonal music suggest that Schoenberg valued gendered-feminine principles in his compositional style, a closer analysis of the work's musical language shows an intact masculinist hegemony. Through his deployment of uncanny tonal reminiscences, underlying tonal gestures, and closed forms in Hanging Gardens, Schoenberg ensures that the feminine-associated "excesses" of atonality remain under masculine control. This study draws upon the critical musicology of Susan McClary while arguing that Schoenberg's music is socially contingent, affected by the gender biases of his social and literary milieux. It addresses likely influences on Schoenberg's worldview including the philosophy of Otto Weininger, Freudian psychoanalysis, and a complex web of personal relationships. Finally, this analysis highlights the relevance of Schoenberg's world and its constructions of gender to modern performance practice, and argues that performers must consider interrelated historical, textual, and musical factors when interpreting Hanging Gardens in new contexts.Dissertation/ThesisD.M.A. Music 201

Modern Narcissus: the lingering reflections of myth in modern art

Why has myth continued to fascinate modern artists, and why the myth of Narcissus, with its modern association with narcissism? This article considers the relationship between the Narcissus myth and the lineage of modern art that runs from Symbolism to surrealism through the polymorphous prism of the Greco-Roman Pantheon to which Narcissus belongs. The article offers an interpretation of the role of mythology in modern art that moves beyond psychoanalysis to incorporate the longer span of the art-historical tradition. Addressing issues of aesthetics, gender and sexuality, the following account highlights Narcissus‟s double nature as an erotic myth that comprises both identity formation and intersubjectivity, as enacted in the field of representation. The myths associated with Narcissus in the history of Western art will help us reconsider his role as a powerful figure capable to activate that slippage between word and image, identity and sociability, representation and reality which was celebrated by the Symbolists and formed the centre of the surrealists‟ social-aesthetic project

An Index to \u3ci\u3eMythlore\u3c/i\u3e, Issues 1 to 50

By author and subject

Witnessing through the skin: the hysteric's body

How does the hysteric bear witness through her body? This article looks at ways in which, from antiquity to the present day, the hysteric has borne witness to the anxiety of her time, age and sex through the speaking surface of her skin. In the 8th century CE a doctor tears the veil off the caliph’s concubine; in the Renaissance physicians and witch-finders look for stigmata; in the eighteenth century hysteria is located in ‘the nerves’; in the early twentieth century Charcot displays hysteria to audience or camera and Freud ‘wipes away’ the memories of Frau Emmy von N. What anxieties mark the surface of the troubled young woman of today? In its conclusion, this article suggests that it is exposure that haunts the outside of her body, circling it without protection, in a world where ‘health’ is not a pleasure but a duty

Thinking Through the 'Present Mad Muddle': The Author as Arbiter of Reconstruction in Inter-War Britain, 1919 - 1945

This thesis argues that British authors of the 1920s and 1930s used the novel form as a means by which to think through ideas of post-war reconstruction. The corpus of novels covered in this thesis--Ford Madox Ford's 'No Enemy' (1929), Aldous Huxley's 'Antic Hay' (1923), Winifred Holtby's 'South Riding' (1936), and George Orwell's 'Coming Up for Air' (1939)--were written by authors who were also (or were primarily) editors, activists, essayists, or journalists. Through an historical approach that takes into account the para-texts that exists parallel to each 'main' work, a specific lineage of thought is considered through the lives of authors and thinkers who were 'historical witnesses' (observers and recorders) of their times. In other words, the thesis is less concerned with these works's place in the modernist literary movement or how each individual work may fit into an authors career (i.e., how 'Antic Hay' may be an example of intellectual development leading to 'Brave New World') than with the historical engagement, exchange, and debate in the post-war years that lead to the production of a number of works which sought to exorcise the horrors of war and imagine the future. Each of the novels considers reconstruction in some fashion: 'No Enemy' works as a means by which to reconstruct Ford's memory of the war and redevelop his ability to write (i.e., a pursuit of resolution through art); 'Antic Hay' looks at contemporaneous urban planning, suggests a connection between the Great Fire of London and the end of WWI, and propagates a mindfulness towards building and dwelling; likewise, 'South Riding' considers social planning in the fictional north-east of England, attempting in the vein of 'Middlemarch' to show the complex tapestry of life of an entire community in the midst of change; finally, 'Coming Up for Air', explores the pessimism with which the inter-war years were wrought, not only because of another, impending world war but the nostalgic realisation that a pre-war order was forever lost

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 21 (10) 1968

published or submitted for publicatio