Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture

Cucullu, Lois B

doi:10.1057/9780230501959

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“…In this article, I consider the guidebook in its own right as a literary phenomenon that, as such, attracts special attention from those engaged in preserving and/or extending the category of literature as part of a modernist agenda. By this, I mean the project loosely identified by Lawrence Rainey, Lois Cucullu, Gail Macdonald, Rod Rosenquist and others as the "institutionalisation of modernism" (Rainey 1998;Cucullu 2004;McDonald 1993;Rosenquist 2009)-the attempt, on behalf of a select group of writers, to consolidate and to market particular texts as "the voice of a 'movement' of our modern experiment since 1900" (Pound as quoted in Rainey 2005, 76). As Lois Cucullu points out, such efforts are entirely consonant with a general move towards specialisation in the early twentieth century: "modernists obey the same cultural logic as do experts of disciplines that systematically professionalise themselves.…”

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“Looking all lost towards a Cook's guide for beauty”: the art of literature and the lessons of the guidebook in modernist writing

Hobson¹

2015

Studies in Travel Writing

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This article explores the impact of the guidebook, especially the Baedeker series, on modernist literary culture. It argues that the guidebook is a literary phenomenon in its own right and that, as such, it attracts special attention from those engaged in defending and/or extending the category of literature as part of a modernist agenda. In particular, modernist writers are concerned as to whether the guidebook counts as a form of literature and, if so, what this means for the more familiar forms seen in their own essays, fiction and travelogues. What might the invention of the star-system to rank scenes and monuments mean for the future of art criticism? How might the guidebook help or hinder the traveller in her pursuit of the beautiful or the picturesque? What does recourse to the guidebook reveal about the taste and education of the traveller? And, more pointedly still, what kind and quality of writing is the guidebook itself? This article surveys the extent of modernism's interest in the guidebook, both as a noteworthy new form and as a form modernist writers adapted for use in their own books, before turning in detail to commentary on the guidebook in E.

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confidence: 99%