by Pericles Lewis Vanessa Bell’s “Studland Beach,” painted around 1912, shows the achievement of British post-impressionism in its arrangement of planes of color and balancing of two groups of figures seen only from behind. The painting emphasizes what Bell’s husband Clive called “significant form.”[1] The figures in the left foreground of the canvas seem to… Continue Reading Studland Beach
Tag: Pericles Lewis
Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)
by Pericles Lewis In August of 1857, the French lawyer who had prosecuted Gustave Flaubert, Ernest Pinard, had greater success in prosecuting Charles Baudelaire for The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) (1857). The court banned six of Baudelaire’s erotic poems, two of them on lesbian themes and the other four heterosexual but mildly… Continue Reading Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)
Antonin Artaud
Biography by Pericles Lewis Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was in fact the author of only a few plays, but he exerted a great influence on theater after the second world through his theoretical writings, which took up a position sharing some intellectual concerns with Bertolt Brecht but proposing a “theater of cruelty” that sharply contrasted with… Continue Reading Antonin Artaud
The Breasts of Tiresias
by Pericles Lewis Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “surrealist” for his play, The Breasts of Tiresias (1917). In the play, set in Africa, a Frenchwoman, Thérèse, decides to become a man, and her breasts float away like two balloons; she is renamed Tiresias and becomes a general and a member of parliament. Between the first… Continue Reading The Breasts of Tiresias
Among School Children
by Pericles Lewis William Butler Yeats’s great poem “Among School Children” (1928) embodies his conception of the almost magical powers of the image or symbol: “O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, / Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? / O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know… Continue Reading Among School Children
Who Goes With Fergus?
by Pericles Lewis The short lyric “Who Goes With Fergus?” (1892) is representative of William Butler Yeats‘s symbolist phase, in which he aimed, not at the simple one-to-one correspondences of allegory, but at a more subtle symbolism, resistant to decipherment. In this short lyric, “love’s bitter mystery” and the mysteries of poetry are symbolized by… Continue Reading Who Goes With Fergus?
Orlando
by Pericles Lewis Virginia Woolf often puzzled about the possibility of a literature that would treat sexuality and especially the sexual life of women frankly, but her own works discuss sex rather indirectly. She wrote one of her lighter but particularly enjoyable novels, Orlando (1928), about a man who becomes a woman (and lives for… Continue Reading Orlando
To the Lighthouse
by Pericles Lewis Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, To the Lighthouse (1927), presents the war in a broader historical perspective than her first two novels, thus serving the function of elegy by coming to terms with the war, but also contributing its share to what the critic Samuel Hynes has called the “Myth of the War” ”—“the… Continue Reading To the Lighthouse
Mrs. Dalloway
by Pericles Lewis In Virginia Woolf‘s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the trauma of the war plays an even more explicit role than in Jacob’s Room (1922), as one of its two protagonists, Septimus Smith, is a veteran suffering severe bouts of mental illness (which Woolf modeled on her own experiences). He has visions of his… Continue Reading Mrs. Dalloway
Jacob’s Room
by Pericles Lewis Virginia Woolf‘s novel Jacob’s Room (1922) concerns the difficulty, especially for his mother, of making posthumous sense of the life of Jacob Flanders, a young man who dies in the first world war. (Flanders was a region of Belgium where the British sustained many of their heaviest casualties). The novel follows Jacob’s… Continue Reading Jacob’s Room