vickery-uncannyvernacular-2009.pdf (122.03 kB)
An uncanny vernacular : comparing the radical modernisms of Lorine Niedecker and Lesbia Harford
The article demonstrates the similarity in the ways poets Lesbia Harford and Lorine Niedecker explored radical modernism. It notes the formal and thematic resemblances between the poets' writing and careers. It cites their uncanniness of poetics as an indicator of the effective global dissemination and specific political and aesthetic applications of Marxist ideologies in the early 20th century. The poets' attention to and resistance to the limitations of a gendered agency are also discussed.
History
Journal
Hecate: an interdisciplinary journal of women's liberationVolume
35Issue
1/2Pagination
77 - 93Publisher
Hecate PressLocation
St Lucia, Qld.ISSN
0311-4198Language
engNotes
This paper considers colonial envy in the work of Australian expatriate artist, Stella Bowen, who is perhaps best known as a long-term partner of writer Ford Madox Ford, and for her paintings of Australian soldiers during World War Two, most notably Bomber Crew (1944). In different ways, Bowen and Ford were highly ambivalent about their outsider/insider status in England, Ford coining the term ‘homo duplex’ to refer to the complexity of identity. Together they would seek to generate a pastoral idyll, a home in which the garden was the dominant ordering mechanism. This yearning for the greenness of the British garden and all it represents can be found in many of Bowen’s paintings. As Sue Thomas has discussed, Bowen would position Jean Rhys as a third term in the colonial equation, representing Rhys as ‘primitive’ to her own ‘provincialism’ which functioned to complicate her sense of belonging. This paper examines how Bowen played upon her own identity of being a bit ‘green’ (in terms of youthful or newly arrived from the colonial ‘suburbs’ (Australia)) in her relationship with Ford and the wider bohemian culture of England and Europe that she entered. It examines how she represented the paradoxic authority and frailty of English whiteness and greenness, particularly in relation to the effects of war and modernist experimentation with primitivism. If time permits, it will then briefly reflect upon how Bowen read national identity during her time as a designated Australian war artist.Reproduced with the specific permission of the copyright holder.Publication classification
C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journalCopyright notice
2009, HECATEUsage metrics
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