Mary Butts

Necessary Contradictions and Feminist Reconstructions

Inbunden, Engelska, 2024

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A scholarly and experimental collection that offers fresh insight—with a feminist focus—into the often overlooked modernist writer Mary Butts and the contested processes of recovering such an author.Scholars instrumental in the recovery of Mary Butts, along with newer writers, publishers, printers, and artists, enter into conversation exploring the work of the British author, whose body of work plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres—writing that can be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Taking its cue from Butts’s experimental, rhythmic writing and the transnational artistic communities in which Butts moved in the 1920s, the collection is a non-linear exchange rather than a collection of isolated arguments—a conversation constructed from "classical" academic chapters, "knight’s move" non-academic reflections, and short responses to these. This conversation lies at the intersection of "feminism" and "reconstruction": Chapters range between Butts’s writing techniques and forms, her position in the modernist canon, contested sites of feminism in her work, critical reception of that work, queer and post-critical readings, and the success of, and the need for, a feminist recovery of the author. The collection aims to be a feminist engagement, while asking questions of what this might look like, why it is needed, and how such an approach offers fresh insight into an erudite, playful, difficult, contradictory, and experimental body of work. Ultimately, the collection asks, how should we reconstruct the author and her work for the contemporary reader?

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2024-05-02
Mått150 x 232 x 20 mm
Vikt520 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor272
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781501380716

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List of FiguresOpening Art 1. Response to Mary Butts, Inspired by Jean Cocteau (Lupe Núñez-Fernández)Opening Art 2. Response to Cover Art for Ashe of Rings, Inspired by Salterns (Lupe Núñez-Fernández)Foreword (Danny Israel, Mary Butts’s grandson)Introduction Through a Series of Letters (Joel Hawkes, University of Victoria, Canada)Part I. Rhythms 1. (Knight's Move) Reimagined Letters, and the Making of an Artist’s Book Edition of Mary Butts's Imaginary Letters (Tim Hopkins, Artist, Printer and Founder of Half Pint Press, UK)- (Response) Reimagining Mary Butts’s Queer Imaginary Letters as Artist Book (Jane Garrity, University of Colorado Boulder, USA)2. (Classical) (Re)Constructions of Gender, Time, and Space, with the Medium as Guide (Jenna Marco, University of South Carolina, USA) - (Response) Mary Butts’s Mediums and Models of Popular Female Authorship (Indu Ohri, Boston University, USA)3. (Knight's Move) A Year at Salterns (Leigh Rocha, Current owner of Salterns and primary school teacher, UK)- (Response) A House Removed from History (Stanislava Dikova, University of Edinburgh, UK)Part II. Resistance4. (Classical) Rights, Property, and Preservation in Mary Butts’s Armed with Madness (Stanislava Dikova, University of Edinburgh, UK)- (Response) “Rights, Property, and Preservation in Mary Butts’s Armed with Madness” (Sanna Melin Schyllert, Université de Nantes, France)5. (Classical) I Like Mary Butts (and I Cannot Lie) (Stephen Ross, University of Victoria, Canada)- (Response) “I cannot lie” (Rosyln Reso Foy, Tulane University, USA)6. (Knight's Move) Mary Butts, Her Work and Papers, and an Interview with Camilla Bagg (Rosyln Reso Foy, Tulane University, USA)- (Response) What It Means to Own a Text (Tim Hopkins, Artist, Printer and Founder of Half Pint Press, UK)7. (Classical) "He Is glad to think of me tied to the soil at last." Mary Butts and the Motherhood Problem (Sanna Melin Schyllert, Université de Nantes, France)- (Response) Mary Butts & the Motherhood Problem (Leigh Rocha, Current owner of Salterns and primary school teacher, UK)Part III. Recoveries 8. "Queer devils" and "beastly indulgences" in Mary Butts’s Unborn Gods (Jane Garrity, University of Colorado Boulder, USA)- (Response) “Queer Devils" (Jenna Marco, University of South Carolina, USA)9. (Knight’s Move) Who’s Afraid of Mary Butts? (Bruce McPherson, editor and publisher of McPherson & Company, USA)- (Response) (Re)discovering Mary Butts (Joel Hawkes, University of Victoria, Canada)10. (Classical) Reconstructing Miltonic Elegies and Freudian Coincidences. Mary Butts’s Queer Theory of Signatures in Her Cornish Stories (Indu Ohri, Boston University, USA)- (Response) “Signatures of all things visible which I am here to read” (Stephen Ross, University of Victoria, Canada)Afterword (Andrew Radford, University of Glasgow, UK)Closing Art. Response to Cover Art of Armed with Madness (Lupe Núñez-Fernández)AcknowledgmentsNotes on ContributorsIndex

Mary Butts is a remarkably complex writer, in turns fascinating and challenging, perspicuous and enigmatic, provocative and frustrating. This delightfully unconventional collection is the first to do full justice to the quality and range of her work, showing Butts to merit consideration alongside better-known modernists while also tackling head on the contradictions and prejudices that make her a difficult prospect for readers today. Bringing together academic voices with those from the world of publishing, book art and Butts’s own milieu, Hawkes has created a rich and enormously rewarding volume which will interest and inspire new readers as well as those already familiar with Butts’s work.