Mary Butts

Joel Hawkes lectures at the University of Victoria, Canada. His publications include The Collected Essays of Mary Butts (2021).

• 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.