Author: Allan Pero
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813054421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A fascinating book that takes us deep into Edith Sitwell's world of artifice, disguise, high camp, and verbal ingenuity. In these essays, Sitwell emerges as a central figure in an alternative avant-garde in early twentieth-century Britain."--Faye Hammill, author of Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History Establishing Edith Sitwell at the center of British modernism, this volume showcases her many achievements in poetry, autobiography, novel writing, criticism, art, and performance. Forgoing the gossip about her eccentric appearance and self-fashioned persona that has too often overshadowed serious writing about her work, the contributors explore how Sitwell combined persona and poetry to foster an outpouring of iconoclastic creativity. The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell argues that Sitwell was crucial to the development of a British avant-garde that operated alongside the conventionally accepted transatlantic modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. With Sitwell as an influential literary player and social architect, the British interwar arts scene was not an ascetic escape from personality--as the modernism of Pound and Eliot has often been characterized--but an alternative space of flamboyant, extravagant, and ornate performance. Allan Pero is associate professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. Gyllian Phillips is associate professor of English studies at Nipissing University.

Author: Edith Sitwell
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "English Eccentrics" by Edith Sitwell. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Author: Dame Edith Sitwell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 504

Get Book Here

Book Description
A complete anthology of the British modernists poetic works explores the ways in which her writing challenged formal conventionalism and class issues, in a volume that includes Fadotade, Clowns Houses, and Gold Coast Customs.

Author: Richard Greene
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 9781860499685
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the better part of forty years, Edith Sitwell's poetry has been neglected by critics. But born into a family of privileged eccentrics, Edith Sitwell was highly regarded by her contemporaries: the great writers and artists of the day who attended her unlikely London literary salon. Her quips and anecdotes were legendary and her works like English Eccentrics confirmed her comic genius, while later she established herself as the quintessential poet of the Blitz. This masterly biography, meticulously researched and drawing on many previously unseen letters, firmly places Edith Sitwell in the literary tradition to which she belongs.

Author: Edith Sitwell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Richard Greene
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 1405511079
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the better part of forty years, Edith Sitwell's poetry has been neglected by critics. But born into a family of privileged eccentrics, Edith Sitwell was highly regarded by her contemporaries: the great writers and artists of the day who attended her unlikely London literary salon. Her quips and anecdotes were legendary and her works like English Eccentrics confirmed her comic genius, while later she established herself as the quintessential poet of the Blitz. This masterly biography, meticulously researched and drawing on many previously unseen letters, firmly places Edith Sitwell in the literary tradition to which she belongs.

Author: Dame Edith Sitwell
Publisher: Portable Poetry
ISBN: 9781785430206
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 38

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE was born on 7 September 1887 in Scarborough in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Edith was the oldest child and only daughter of her wildly eccentric and unloving parents. Her father, believing she had a spinal deformation, imposed upon her a 'cure' which involved locking her into an iron frame. In 1913 Edith began to publish her poetry, her first was in the Daily Mirror; The Drowned Suns. Unconventional at best as a person her poems reflect this with her exotic costumes and dramatic style all hung on a six foot frame: many adored her, others thought her a poseur. In 1914, the 26-year-old Edith moved to a small, down at heel flat in Bayswater, which she shared with Helen Rootham, her governess since 1903. Between 1916 and 1921 she edited Wheels, an annual poetic anthology compiled with her brothers - a literary collaboration generally called "the Sitwells." Edith was engrossed by the distinction between poetry and music, and with Facade (1922), she created a series of abstract poems, the rhythms of which counter-parted those of music, set to music by William Walton. Facade was performed behind a curtain with a hole in the mouth of a painted face and the words were recited through the hole with the aid of a Sengerphone. The public were baffled by it. Edith spent her life unmarried, but in 1927 it is said she fell in love with the homosexual Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. The relationship lasted until 1928, the same year that Rootham underwent operations for cancer. In 1929 she published Gold Coast Customs, a poem about the artificiality of human behaviour and the barbarism that lies beneath the surface. The poem was written in the rhythms of tom-toms and jazz. In 1932, Rootham and Edith moved to Paris, where they lived with Rootham's younger sister, Evelyn Wiel. With the Second World War Edith returned from France. In a house with no electricity she wrote by oil lamp. These poems include Street Songs, The Song of the Cold, and The Shadow of Cain, all of which garnered much public praise. However the London blitz poem "Still Falls the Rain" endures as her best loved poem. It was set to music by Benjamin Britten. She became a proponent and supporter of innovative trends in English poetry. Her flat became a meeting place for young writers including Dylan Thomas. In 1948 Edith toured the United States with her brothers, reciting her poetry and, notoriously, giving a reading of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene. Edith became a Dame Commander (DBE) in 1954. In August 1955 she converted to Roman Catholicism. As a writer Edith claimed to only write prose for money and with titles such as English Eccentrics (1933), Victoria of England (1936), her novel, I Live under a Black Sun, based on the life of Jonathan Swift (1937) and two books about Queen Elizabeth I: Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) and The Queens and the Hive (1962) she was very successful at that. Edith lived from 1961 until her death in a flat in Hampstead in London. As the subject of This Is Your Life in November 1962 she was surprised by host Eamonn Andrews on the stage of the BBC Television Theatre in London. Edith died of cerebral haemorrhage at St Thomas' Hospital on 9 December 1964 at the age of 77. She is buried in the churchyard of Weedon Lois in Northamptonshire.

Author: Edith Sitwell
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1448202051
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 30

Get Book Here

Book Description
First published in London in 1962, this collection of Sitwell's later poetry contains "several pieces which show that the lyrical impulse of her early days was still alive to make new discoveries of great freshness and tenderness" - Dictionary of National Biography "Her mastery of the long line, the pause, of contrasting fullness and ghostliness of sound is as striking as ever. So is her high simplicity of spirit." -The Times Literary Supplement

Author: Elizabeth Black
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351867113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book Here

Book Description
This books presents the first extended study of the relationship between British modernist poetry and the environment. Challenging reductive associations of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, the book’s central argument is that within British modernist poetry there is a clear and sustained interest in the natural world which has yet to receive adequate critical attention. Whilst modernist studies continues to emphasize the plurality of the movement and the breadth of voices and concerns within it, the environmental consciousness of modernist literature and its response to changes to human/nature relations following the experience of war and modernity remain largely unexamined. Exploring British modernist poetry from an ecocritical perspective offers a fresh approach to the movement and its context, and produces original readings of both canonical and more marginalized modernist voices. This book opens by discussing the relationship between modernism and ecocriticism and the benefits of creating a dialogue between the two. It then presents new readings of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Charlotte Mew that reveal a shared preoccupation with environmental issues and a common desire to find new ways of achieving physical, psychological, and artistic reconnection with nature. Building on the continuing growth of ecocriticism, this book demonstrates how green approaches to modernist studies can produce new insights into both individual poets and the modernist movement as a whole, making it an essential resource for students of modernism, ecocriticism, and early-twentieth-century literature.

Author: Edith Dame Sitwell, 1887-1964
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781360881430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 44

Get Book Here

Book Description