J. Barrie Bullen – författare

This book explores interconnections between high literary modernism and the revolution in dress design of the early twentieth century. During this time, new and «liberated» lifestyles created a bond among figures as diverse as writers and fashion editors, painters and art critics, photographers and models, dancers and economists – all of whom were in different ways looking at new «inventive clothes» (Vreeland) as life experiences.Starting points of the research are Pirandello’s One, no one, and one hundred thousand, where the protagonist’s disowning of his own image in the mirror ignites a tragedy, and Roger Fry’s essays on the resuscitation of Victorianism at the end of the First World War, where the phantasmagoria of time is identified as the basis for modern illusion.Each chapter in the book explores a different facet of the same topic: the distance between self and image as the dispenser or destroyer of enchantment. This issue was actively pursued by philosophers (Benjamin), writers (Woolf, Mansfield, Fitzgerald), photographers (Man Ray, Cecil Beaton) and fashion critics (Vreeland). The evolution in fashion editing was meanwhile instructing the sophisticated readers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in the art of contemplating their own reflections in the mirror and seeing in them exactly what they wanted to see.The Natasha of the title is Tolstoy’s heroine, a secret spring of creative energy for Katherine Mansfield, and the source of one of Diana Vreeland’s most perceptive insights into the nature of fashion.

This book is concerned with the presence of familiar objects in unfamiliar places. It examines the literary practice of inserting imaginary photographs of art, architecture, and people into novels and short stories. These photographs are fictive objects, although some, especially those of art and architecture, have equivalents in real life. The book examines the presence of invented photographs in the writings of six authors who made extensive use of this practice. The first part of the book concentrates on E. M. Forster, while also including some discussion of imaginary photographs in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street. The second part of the book analyses the uses of photographs in the writings of Forster’s near contemporaries, with separate chapters being devoted to Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. An epilogue touches on Christopher Isherwood, a member of the next generation of British writers. The book focuses upon largely unexplored areas in the writings of these authors – what Virginia Woolf in ‘Modern Fiction’ styled ‘un-expected places’.

This book spans the most significant phases of Ford’s literary production, from his art criticism to his main modernist novels: The Good Soldier, Parade’s End, The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh. The aim is to explore the uncharted territory of Ford’s interest in the scopic field, claiming that his investigation of the optical unconscious is his most original contribution to the modernist concern for the stream of consciousness.This is the first in-depth study of Ford’s interest in the gaze and how it is related to writing, painting, music, sculpture, visual technologies and forms of popular entertainment. Undermining the clichéd critical vision of Ford as the last Pre-Raphaelite or proto-Futurist, this study analyses Ford’s fascination with the visual avant-garde and his response to the revolution of photography and (proto-) cinematographic forms from the specific angle of the scopic drive. Part history, part theoretical discussion embedded in the close reading of the texts, this book is also concerned with Ford as a great stylist whose writing strives to project an image of itself and its structures in the reader’s eye. Drawing inspiration from psychoanalysis and art criticism, the author capitalises on the theories of Jacques Lacan, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Jonathan Crary, and Norman Bryson to disclose the fascinating and baffling universe of Ford’s gaze.This is a revised and extended English translation of the original book Ford Madox Ford: Visione/visualità e scrittura.