Modernism's Mythic Pose Gender, Genre, Solo Performance Modernist Literature and Culture Series

Winner of the de la Torre Bueno prize, Society of Dance History Scholars The ancient world served as an unconventional source of inspiration for a generation of modernists. Drawing on examples from literature, dance, photography, and film, Modernism's Mythic Pose argues that a strain of antimodern-classicism permeates modernist celebrations of novelty, shock, and technology. The touchstone of Preston's study is Delsartism--the popular transnational movement which promoted mythic statue--posing, poetic recitation, and other hybrid solo performances for health and spiritual development. Derived from nineteenth-century acting theorist François Delsarte and largely organized by women, Delsartism shaped modernist performances, genres, and ideas of gender. Even Ezra Pound, a famous promoter of the "new," made ancient figures speak in the "old" genre of the dramatic monologue and performed public recitations. Recovering precedents in nineteenth-century popular entertainments and Delsartism's hybrid performances, this book considers the canonical modernists Pound and T. S. Eliot, lesser-known poets like Charlotte Mew, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, Isadora Duncan the international dance star, and H.D. as poet and film actor. Preston's interdisciplinary engagement with performance, poetics, modern dance, and silent film demonstrates that studies of modernism often overemphasize breaks with the past. Modernism also posed myth in an ambivalent relationship to modernity, a halt in the march of progress that could function as escapism, skeptical critique, or a figure for the death of gods and civilizations.

Series Editors' Foreword. Acknowledgments. Introduction.. I. Modern, Antimodern, and Mythic Posing. II. Gendered Identity and Embodiment. III. Biblical Typology and Classical Ritual. IV. Solo Genres. V. Modernist Kinaesthetics. Chapter 1. The Solo's Origins: Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues. I. Galatea's Reach: Gestures of the Monodrama. II. Veiled Motions: Emma Lyon Hamilton's Attitude. III. Goethe's Proserpina and Later Posers. IV. Barrett Browning: Naming "Aeschylus" and "The Virgin Mary". V. Types and Housewives in Christina Rossetti and Augusta Webster. Chapter 2. Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film. I. Delsarte's Aesthetics of the Attitude. II. Disseminating Delsarte. III. Performing Delsartism: Genevieve Stebbins and the Early Motions of Modern Dance. IV. Performing Delsartism (Take Two): Denishawn and Hollywood. V. The Russian Delsarte: Kuleshov and Film Montage. Chapter 3. Positioning Genre: The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures of Recitation. I..

Carrie J. Preston is Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University.