divdivBritish modernist writer Mary Butts (1890–1937), now recognized as one of the most important and original authors of the interwar years, lived an unconventional life. She encountered many of the most famous figures in early twentieth-century literature, music, and art—among them T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein—and came to know some of them intimately. These luminaries figure prominently in journals in which Butts chronicled the development of her craft between 1916 and her untimely death in 1937. This volume is the first substantial edition of her journals. Introduced and annotated by Nathalie Blondel, the leading authority on Butts’s life and works, the book reveals the workings of a complex and distinctive mind while offering vivid insights into her fascinating era. /DIV/DIV
The thirteen essays and 117 literary reviews gathered in this book were written largely between 1932 and 1937, the most productive period of Mary Butts's foreshortened literary career---she died at 47. After spending most of the 'twenties on the Continent, principally Paris, with the madding American and English survivors of the soi-disant "Lost Generation," she repatriated to London before settling with a new husband permanently in Sennen, a Cornish village close to Land's End. Famously impractical about money, she must have welcomed the editor Hugh Ross Williamson's invitation to review for The Bookman as a means to supplement her small allowance and book royalties. Considering her charming and personal reviews, this work must have given her satisfaction; it is surely not hackwork. Within a short time she was engaged to write reviews and essays for other prominent journals and newspapers, including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Manchester Guardian, The London Mercury, Time and Tide, John O'London Weekly, The Adelphi, Everyman, and even Crime-which she accomplished while somehow maintaining a steady production of stories, novels, and a memoir of her childhood, and all of this despite marital strife, financial pressures, and worsening health. For the shorter pieces, as a reviewer for hire, it's doubtful she had much choice of books, but her keenest interests and expertise-as well as friendships with contemporary authors-were probably known to her editors, who commissioned accordingly. The range, variety, and depth of subjects is little short of remarkable, from classical literature to popular fiction (historicals, mysteries, the uncanny), from history (French and English) to Eastern religion to the American Depression to gardening, and on and on. Moreover, "reviews" is a misnomer for most of Butts's shorter pieces because her approach is conversational and opinionated, and sprinkled with interesting asides. Better to think of them as miniature essays. Her erudition can be formidable, her thought associations eclectic, her tone scholarly, elegant, jazzy or passionate. However, her longer essays-concerning Aldous Huxley, Baron Corvo, and supernatural fiction, for example-are more like English gardens: structured and carefully tended, but allowing for spaces of intellectual play.
“Winning, cheeky, and illuminating….What appears initially as a folly with a look-at-this cover and title becomes, thanks to Radke’s intelligence and curiosity, something much meatier, entertaining, and wise.” —The Washington Post “Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction.” —Esquire, Best Books of 2022 A “carefully researched and reported work of cultural history” (The New York Times) that explores how one body part has influenced the female—and human—experience for centuries, and what that obsession reveals about our lives today. Whether we love them or hate them, think they’re sexy, think they’re strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. A woman’s butt, in particular, is forever being assessed, criticized, and objectified, from anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down a street or high school hallways. But why? In Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out. Spanning nearly two centuries, this “whip-smart” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) cultural history takes us from the performance halls of 19th-century London to the aerobics studios of the 1980s, the music video set of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” and the mountains of Arizona, where every year humans and horses race in a feat of gluteal endurance. Along the way, she meets evolutionary biologists who study how butts first developed; models whose measurements have defined jean sizing for millions of women; and the fitness gurus who created fads like “Buns of Steel.” She also examines the central importance of race through figures like Sarah Bartmann, once known as the “Venus Hottentot,” Josephine Baker, Jennifer Lopez, and other women of color whose butts have been idolized, envied, and despised. Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.
The fifth edition of Nursing Ethics has been revised to reflect the most current issues in healthcare ethics including new cases, laws, and policies. The text continues to be divided into three sections: Foundational Theories, Concepts and Professional Issues; Moving Into Ethics Across the Lifespan; and Ethics Related to Special Issues focused on specific populations and nursing roles.
Gendering Classicism explores the intersection of feminism, historical fiction, and modernism through the work of six writers, all of whom wrote historical novels set in ancient Greece or Rome: Naomi Mitchison, Mary Butts, Laura Riding, Phyllis Bentley, Bryher, and Mary Renault. As women gained access to higher education in the late nineteenth century, they gained access also to the classical learning that had for so long demarcated and legitimated the British ruling classes. Steeped in misogyny, the classical tradition presented educated women with a massive project: the recasting of that tradition in terms that acknowledged the existence of women - as historical agents and interpreters of the historical past.
One of the first studies to explore the relationship between environmental criticism and British modernism, Green Modernism explores the cultural function of nature in the modernist novel between 1900 and 1930. This theoretically engaged, historically informed book brings new materialist insights to novels by Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, and Butts.
"What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) developed into an expansive and unique quest for a poetics that would fuel Duncan's great work into the 1960s and 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the writings of H.D., Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and many others, Duncan's wide-ranging work is especially notable for illuminating the role women played in creating literary modernism"--From publisher description.
Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces the work of the British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), and the immense potential of his ideas for thinking about literature, creative process, and creative writing. There is now renewed interest in Bion’s work following the publication of his Complete Works but the complexities of his theory and his distinctive style can be forbidding. Less well-known than Freud or Lacan, the work of Wilfred Bion nevertheless offers new insights for psychoanalytic literary criticism and creative writing. For newer readers of his work, this book offers an engaging introduction to several of Bion’s key ideas, including his theory of thinking (the ‘thought without a thinker’), the container/contained relationship, alpha-function; alpha-elements, beta-elements, and bizarre objects; K and -K; the Grid, O, and the caesura. It also offers a way in to Bion’s astonishing and challenging experimental work, A Memoir of the Future, and explores the impact of his devastating personal experiences as an officer during the First World War. Each chapter of Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism draws on one or more specific aspects of Bion’s theory in relation to creative texts by Sigmund Freud, Stevie Smith, B.S. Johnson, Mary Butts, Jean Rhys, Nicholas Royle, J.G. Ballard, and Wilfred Bion himself. The first full-length study to explore the potential of Bion’s ideas for literary criticism, Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism introduces his complex and extensive work for a new audience in an accessible and engaging way, and will be of great interest to scholars of creative writing, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis.
