During 2022 the many centennial celebrations of Modernism’s “miracle year” gave focus to the publishing milestones with which all Modernist scholars are familiar: Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room foremost among them. This focus gave prominence to the industry and ingenuity of women in bringing this vortex of creativity to public prominence: in the case of Ulysses exhibitions at the Harry Ransom Center and elsewhere gave detailed accounts of Harriet Shaw Weaver as Joyce’s patron, Sylvia Beach as his publisher in Paris, and Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson as his fearless publishers and advocates in New York. Yet a shift from milestones to artistic networks might yield a more nuanced and complex account of “The Women of 1922” and of modernism more generally. This chapter proposes that the creative network between three women—Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Mina Loy—provides a very different sense of artistic potential and opportunity. Djuna Barnes relocated from New York to Paris in 1922 while completing her project published as A Book (1923). She acted as agent to and editor of the Baroness, supporting her move from New York to Berlin, her publications in The Little Review and elsewhere, and her attempts to write her memoir—their correspondence reveals the debts and gratitude in their relationship. Mina Loy and the Baroness frequented the same circles in New York before Loy too migrated to Berlin via Mexico, Buenos Aires, London, Florence, and Paris, and both writers experimented with mixed media assemblages in their work. By examining shared lines of friendship, patronage, communication (including extant correspondence), and artistic experimentation (pushing the boundaries of obscenity, for example), this chapter explores the “other side” of 1922, where milestones such as Loy’s Lunar Baedeker reside alongside poverty, transience, loss, and the threat of censorship of avant-garde innovation.

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

Migration and Filiation: The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Djuna Barnes, and Mina Loy in 1922

  • Mark Byron

摘要

During 2022 the many centennial celebrations of Modernism’s “miracle year” gave focus to the publishing milestones with which all Modernist scholars are familiar: Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room foremost among them. This focus gave prominence to the industry and ingenuity of women in bringing this vortex of creativity to public prominence: in the case of Ulysses exhibitions at the Harry Ransom Center and elsewhere gave detailed accounts of Harriet Shaw Weaver as Joyce’s patron, Sylvia Beach as his publisher in Paris, and Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson as his fearless publishers and advocates in New York. Yet a shift from milestones to artistic networks might yield a more nuanced and complex account of “The Women of 1922” and of modernism more generally. This chapter proposes that the creative network between three women—Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Mina Loy—provides a very different sense of artistic potential and opportunity. Djuna Barnes relocated from New York to Paris in 1922 while completing her project published as A Book (1923). She acted as agent to and editor of the Baroness, supporting her move from New York to Berlin, her publications in The Little Review and elsewhere, and her attempts to write her memoir—their correspondence reveals the debts and gratitude in their relationship. Mina Loy and the Baroness frequented the same circles in New York before Loy too migrated to Berlin via Mexico, Buenos Aires, London, Florence, and Paris, and both writers experimented with mixed media assemblages in their work. By examining shared lines of friendship, patronage, communication (including extant correspondence), and artistic experimentation (pushing the boundaries of obscenity, for example), this chapter explores the “other side” of 1922, where milestones such as Loy’s Lunar Baedeker reside alongside poverty, transience, loss, and the threat of censorship of avant-garde innovation.