The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell

Allan Pero, Gyllian Phillips

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780813052847
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Sitwells and Sitwellism: An Ornamental Modernism
• 3. A Stranger’s Conversations with Life: Edith Sitwell and the Problems of Biography
• 4. “The Apotheosis of Edith”: Artifice and Noblesse Oblige in Cecil Beaton’s Portraits of the Sitwell Siblings
• 5. “Sunshades will usurp their space”: Edith Sitwell, Sacheverell Sitwell, and the Dreaming Clowns of Melancholy
• 6. Sitwell beyond the Semiotic: Gender, Race, and Empire in Façade
• 7. “Glittering like the wind”: Edith Sitwell’s Female Poetry
• 8. Edith Sitwell’s Critical Self-Doubling
• 9. Gothic Futures: Edith Sitwell and Women’s Labor in Interwar British Modernism
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX