Diluting holy writ: from the 'men of 1914' to the beat generation. Issue 9 (1st September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Stevenson, Guy
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 34:Issue 9(2020)
• Page Start: 1575
• Page End: 1598
• Publication Date: 2020-09-01
• Subjects: Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1808300
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the paradox between progressive and reactionary forces in inter-war European modernism through parallels between the London-based writers T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and between Pound and Lewis' avant-garde art group The Vorticists and the American pre-Beatnik Henry Miller. How did the artistic quest to respect and delineate difference lead writers like Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline towards a fascist politics that abhorred it? At the other end of the political spectrum, how do the utopian, radically humanist ideals of a writer like Henry Miller find expression through confrontationally anti-humanist language? The answers to these questions, I argue, shed unexpected light on the politics of the American counterculture after World War Two, a moment that is too often understood in unquestioningly progressive terms.