The Modernist Cult of Ugliness
Subtitle: Aesthetic and Gender Politics
Edition: 1st edition
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: August 3, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780312240370
Subjects: Feminism; Modernism; Philosophy; Literary Criticism; Gender Studies; Semiotics & Theory; Literary Criticism & Collections / General; General; Aesthetics; Ugliness
First sentence: A brilliant artist praised for "inaugurating a revolution, leading intransigent youth against the strongholds of tradition and academic complacence" (Fry 1903:345) but also known for his irascible temperament and timely barbs lashes out at an eminent critic (once, the chief proponent and defender of "new" art) who has trashed the artist's work, in writing, as a deliberate and very public affront.
Description: ""Cult of ugliness," Ezra Pound's phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme - the self-styled "Men of 1914" - responded to the "horrid or sordid or disgusting" conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practice. Only the representation of "ugliness," they protested, would produce the new, truly "beautiful" work of art.

They dissociated the beautiful from its traditional embodiment in female beauty, and from its association with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In the process, the cultivation of ugliness displaced misogyny and homophobia. Higgins takes in texts such as John Ruskin's art criticism, Eliot's literary journalism, Lewis's pro-fascism pamphlets, and the poetry of Pound and William Carlos Williams.

She demonstrates that even vigorous champions of beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery."--BOOK JACKET.