Article Title：'Go in fear of abstractions': Modernism and the spectre of democracy
Abstract：
This essay argues that many of the aesthetic imperatives and critical categories associated with modernism (imagism, vorticism, impersonality, the 'dissociation of sensibility,' the stream of consciousness, etc.) grew directly out of a host of non-literary concerns such as eugenics, diet reform, vegetarianism and birth control, which are too often written out of the literary histories of the period. Drawing extensively on material from two of the periodicals in which many of these critical concepts were first aired, the New Age and the Freewoman, it shows how the languages used to address a wide range of social and political concerns fuel and feed off each other. It goes so far as to suggest that the history of modernist criticism is a history involving the euphemization, aestheticization and institutionalization of the outlandish and scandalous, and that ideologies which in their raw state might seem at least intellectually spurious, at worst morally unpalatable, have been imbibed by generation of scholars in a diluted, aestheticized form. Above all, the piece argues, modernist criticism shaped itself in response to the threat posed by the 'spectre' of democracy (an image I explain in the essay itself).
Keywords: modernism; eugenics; democracy; New Age; Freewoman; Pound
DOI: 10.1080/095023600750040667
Source：TEXTUAL PRACTICE
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