The Degenerate Muse
American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene
Series: Modernist Literature and Culture;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 19 September 2013
- ISBN 9780199920327
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages336 pages
- Size 165x236x30 mm
- Weight 567 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
The early twentieth century marked a dramatic shift in the American conception of nature. This book analyzes the ways in which the scientific recasting of American nature as an antidote for degeneration influenced work of important modernist writers Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore.
MoreLong description:
This book offers an important reconsideration of the cultural impulses that drove American literary modernism. America's modernist poets came of age in a nation struggling to redefine its relationship with poetry and with nature. In the early twentieth century, Darwinian science dictated that as countries became more civilized, as their citizens dwelt increasingly in the realms of artifice they created, they ceased to engage in the invigorating struggles against nature that kept them fit. Civilization led to the medical condition known as degeneration, the morbid deviation of men from an identifiable "normal type." Eager to save America from the fate of a degenerate Europe, Progressive Era reformers prescribed the invigorating contact with American nature as a means to keep the American race clean and healthy. In order for nature to serve as an antidote for degeneration, however, it needed to remain a realm of hard facts and unremitting forces, a delusion-free place free of art that cleansed the mind rather than clouded it. Drawing on a wide range of primary and archival sources, this book argues that the widespread American turn back to nature in the early twentieth century had profound consequences for America's modernist poets. Like other Americans of their day, Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore heeded the widespread American call to head back to nature for the sake of the nation's health, but they faced a difficult challenge. Turning to American nature as a means to combat the threat of American degeneration in their literary work, they needed to create a form of American poetry that would be a cure for degeneration rather than a cause. My work reveals the ways in which Monroe's, Pound's, and Moore's struggles to create and publish poems that could resist degeneration by keeping faith with American nature influenced ideas about what American poetry should be and do in the twentieth century.
Ultimately, by redefining nature's role in American literature as one of intellectual fertility rather than stagnation, Robin Schulze constructs a convincing case for the idea that American literary modernism succeeded in making nature itself modern.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
Introduction: Toward a Modern Nature
Chapter One: Nature Study, Degeneration, and the Problem of Poetry
Chapter Two: Harriet Monroe's Pioneer Modernism
Chapter Three: Ezra Pound and the Poetics of Hygiene
Chapter Four: Marianne Moore, Degeneration, and Domestication
Chapter Five: Marianne Moore, Nature, and National Health
Conclusion
Bibliography
