"The Priestess, The Medium, The Prophetess" : Identity in British Modernist Literary Patronage
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Placing modernist literary production into the larger context of the avant-garde personal networks greatly erodes the myth of the modernist creative genius. It allows for an understanding of the complex mechanisms at play even in small-scale productions, each capable of influencing the final literary work. Easy to see from hindsight, especially with help of Bourdieu and Becker, it was also felt acutely by the modernist writers themselves. For fear of their work being viewed as unoriginal or, even more radically, collaborative, writers such as Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, and Siegfried Sassoon took pains to distance themselves from their patrons who often facilitated the production of their works by means of financial or non-material support. In order to navigate the labyrinthian relationships of patronage, both them and their patrons, chiefly Ottoline Morrell and Sibyl Colefax, assumed various identities and employed strategies which will be explored in this paper. |
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