Catherine E. Paul – författare

This book explores the relationships between four modernist poets and the museums that helped shape their writing. During the early twentieth century, museums were trying to reach a wider audience and used displayed objects to teach that audience about art, culture, and ecology. Writers such as Yeats, Pound, Moore, and Stein borrowed strategies and techniques from museums in order to create literary modernism. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism places these writers' poetry and prose within the context of specific gallery spaces, curatorial practices, displayed objects, and exhibition objectives of the museums that inspired them, exposing the ways in which literary modernism is linked to museums. Although critics have attested to the importance of the visual arts to literary modernists and have begun to explore the relationships between literary production and social institutions, before now no one has examined the particular institutions in which modernist poets found the artworks, specimens, and other artifacts that inspired their literary innovations. Catherine Paul's book offers the reader a fresh encounter with modernism that will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies and museum studies. Catherine Paul is Associate Professor of English, Clemson University.

Writing Modern Ireland examines the complex literary manifestations of Ireland and Irishness from the turn of the twentieth century to very recently. Together with examinations of the nation, the collected essays consider Irish identities that may be sexual, racial, regional, gendered, disabled and able-bodied, traumatized and in the process of healing. Identity, like literary texts, is a constant process of making and remaking, revision and publication. This collection takes up the question of what it means to write modern Ireland, evoking the many resonances that name will carry: a mythic place, a land controlled from elsewhere, a nation hoped for and achieved, a nation denied and resisted, an island divided, an idea soaked in fantasies and dreams, a homeland abandoned in searches for brighter futures, a land of opportunity, a people who are many people, and a place defined by writers who both empower and challenge it. W. B. Yeats looms large, as he does in modern Irish writing, and in commemoration of his sesquicentennial year. Building on a themed issue of The South Carolina Review, the present volume is expanded and rededicated by Catherine E. Paul (Clemson University). It features critical essays by Ronald Schuchard on Yeats, Michael Sidnell on Beckett, Liam Harte on Sebastian Barry, Jefferson Holdridge on contemporary Irish poets, and Thomas Dillon Redshaw on the revival of the Cuala Press (illustrated), together with a host of significant scholarship and criticism by 14 additional international experts from the USA, UK, Belgium, France, and (of course) Ireland.

In 1938, American poet Ezra Pound published Guide to Kulchur, a book so radically different from his earlier writing that readers might not have believed that it was written by the same firebrand aesthetician who had advocated in 1913 that poets go in fear of abstractions. But Guide to Kulchur was only the latest example of a new kind of prose that Pound had been writing—fiercely invested in politics and the mobilization of cultural heritage to its service. Pound’s new modernism came as a direct effect of his investment in fascism. Since the last monographic treatment of Pound’s fascism, scholars of literature, history, art history, urban design, and music have uncovered important aspects of the fascist regime’s use of culture to foment Italian national identity. These studies reveal the cultural, mythical, rhetorical, and intellectual aspects of that regime—more than enough new knowledge to require a reappraisal of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in that era, and perhaps the entire twentieth century. Unlike previous discussions of Pound’s adoption of Italian fascism, which focus mostly on his political and economic interests, this book reveals the importance of the cultural projects of Mussolini’s fascist regime. By bringing Italian primary sources and new approaches to the cultural project of Mussolini’s regime to bear on Pound’s prose work (including unpublished material from the Pound Papers and untranslated periodical contributions), Paul shows how Pound’s modernism changed as a result of involvement in Italian politics and culture. At the same time, it uses the familiar figure of Pound to provide an entry for scholars of Anglo-American modernism into the diverse and complex realm of Italian modernism.A Winner of the 2016 Ezra Pound Society Book Award.