Diana Collecott proposes that Sappho's presence in H. D.'s work is as significant as that of Homer in Pound's and of Dante in Eliot's. She undertakes a radical revision of H. D.'s Hellenism and her Imagism, relating both to the literary and sexual politics of the First World War period. She then pursues H.D.'s career to the end of the Second World War, discovering en route important intertextualities with Swinburne, Wilde and Shakespeare. Connecting the fragmentary condition of Sappho's writings with the erasure of women within modernism and the silencing of lesbians in the wider culture, she traces the Sapphic in H.D.'s prose and poetry an in its modern contexts. Her exploration develops a lesbian poetics not only for H.D. but also for contemporaries such as Bryher, Amy Lowell and Virginia Woolf and for successors such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Olga Broumas.
| ISBN | 0521101832 | | Pages | 368 | | ISBN13 | 9780521101837
(What's this?) | | Volumes | 1 | | Publisher | Cambridge University Press | | Weight (grammes) | 540 | | Imprint | Cambridge University Press | | Published in | Cambridge | | Format | Paperback | | Height (mm) | 229 | | Publication date | 18 Dec 2008 | | Width (mm) | 152 | | Library of Congress | PS3507.O726 Z615 1999 | | Spine width (mm) | 21 | | DEWEY | na | | Academic level | Professional / Scholarly | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | |
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Introduction: Saphho, Sapphic, Saph; 1. She too is my poet: Sapphistry; 2. A life of being: negotiating gender; 3. The perfect bi-: negotiating sexuality; 4. Straight as the Greek: Hellenism and modernism; 5. The art of the future: her emergence from Imagism; 6. What is (not) said: lesbian poetics; 7. Re-membering Shakes-pear: negotiations with tradition; Afterword: at the crossroads; Appendix; Notes; Works Cited; Index.
"...[an] erudite study..." M.S. Vogeler, Choice "In its sustained scholarship, innovative theoretical exploration, and illuminating interpretation of H.D's writing, Diana Collecott's study represents a significant and impressive accomplishment, and will certainly alter permanently the way in which H.D. is read. The importance of H.D. and Sapphic Modernism is in laying open many dimensions of H.D.'s Sapphic intertextuality, especially the profound cultural, political, and artistic implications of Sapphism in the early twentieth century. This entails the recovery of an intricate and dense network of women writers, whose literary project and whose whole conception of intellectual exchange was distict from the climate of early modernism and its male collaborators." Eileen Gregory
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