H.D. and the Victorian fin de siècle
Subtitle: gender, modernism, decadence
By: Cassandra Laity.
Series: Cambridge studies in American literature and culture
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
Subjects: H. D. 1886-1961 -- Knowledge -- Literature.; Women and literature -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 20th century.; English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Decadence (Literary movement) -- Great Britain.; Modernism (Literature) -- United States.; American poetry -- English influences.; Sex (Psychology) in literature.; Gender identity in literature.; Aestheticism (Literature)
Other titles: HD and the Victorian fin de siècle
Description: H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle argues foremost that H.D. eluded the male modernist flight from Romantic "effeminacy" and "personality" by embracing the very cults of personality in the Decadent Romanticism of Oscar Wilde, A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, and D. G. Rossetti that her male contemporaries most deplored: the cult of the demonic femme fatale and of the "effeminate" Aesthete androgyne.

H.D., Laity maintains, used these sexually aggressive masks to shape a female modernism that freely engaged female and male androgyny, homoeroticism, narcissism, and maternal eroticism.

Focusing on the early Sea Garden, the plays and poetry of the 1920s, and her later epic, Trilogy, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle demonstrates H.D.'s shift from the homoerotic, "white," vanishing tropology of the male androgyne fashioned by Pater and Wilde to the "abject" monstrously sexual body of the Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent femme fatale.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-210) and index.