Violence and the Pacifist Body in Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations

Pulham, Patricia

doi:10.1057/9780230289802_3

Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature 2010

DOI: 10.1057/9780230289802_3

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Violence and the Pacifist Body in Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations

Patricia Pulham¹

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Cited by 3 publications

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“…Lee's pacifist activism had a deeply damaging effect on her reputation in England, where she was socially marginalized and attacked in the press. This enforced marginality suited the cantankerous Lee, who cultivated it as a position of political and cultural resistance (Mahoney, 2013: 315; on Lee's pacifism see also Beer, 1997;Brockington, 2016;Pulham, 2010). Indeed, when the war was over, Lee kept reiterating her controversial stance.…”

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Literary cosmopolitanism in the age of the League of Nations: Vernon Lee, Daniel Halévy and La Revue de Genève

Evangelista

2021

Journal of European Studies

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In 1921, the newly founded French-language periodical, La Revue de Genève, featured an exchange of letters between Daniel Halévy and Vernon Lee in which the two writers articulated contrasting visions of national identity and international literary relations. Reflecting on the traumatic experience of the First World War, Halévy called for literature and the role of the writer to be depoliticized. Lee, by contrast, put forward a politicized model of cosmopolitanism that challenged the renewed emphasis on national sovereignty in the post-war international order. Their exchange sheds light on the tense negotiation of literary cosmopolitanism that followed the Versailles settlement and the establishment of the League of Nations.

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Literary cosmopolitanism in the age of the League of Nations: Vernon Lee, Daniel Halévy and La Revue de Genève

Evangelista

2021

Journal of European Studies

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Allegories on the international scene: Vernon Lee’s, Mina Loy’s, and Else Lasker-Schüler’s war plays

Herold

2021

Feminist Modernist Studies

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Modernist drama between 1914 and 1945 underwent a process of rejuvenation through the remarkable revival of the medieval mystery play in women's writing on war. The adaptation of the allegorical mode of medieval drama allowed female authors to comment on political conflict, national identity, and the shifting of gender roles from a combined perspective of the inherently personal and the global. This article investigates how Vernon Lee, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schüler, three authors working across the turn of the century and across various nations, remodeled the form into personal manifestos of cosmopolitan authorship. Lee's Satan the Waster (1914/20), Loy's The Sacred Prostitute (1914), and Lasker-Schüler's IchundIch (I and I, 1940/41) expose the dual status of the poet as performer and critic of their own time. The allegorical capacity of these plays allows them to ironize and criticize the idea of rigid boundaries, be these historical, national, or gendered. As these authors demonstrate, the destabilizing of boundaries common to decadent, performative writing was developed and adapted in modernist avant-garde writing.

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An Outpost of Modernism: The Diplomatic Design of Cosmopolis

Dam¹

2018

Victoriographies

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Although certain works published in the fin-de-siècle journal Cosmopolis: An International Review (1896–8) would have a lasting impact on twentieth-century literature, the principles behind its design have escaped critical attention. This article posits that Cosmopolis anticipated a form of modernism that Walter Benjamin would later conceptualise in his ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921) and ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). The interplay between Benjamin's two essays suggests that translation allows one to reach a nonviolent resolution of conflict through language: a translation's mediation between an original work and pure language presents a nonviolent form of coexistence. The editors and writers of Cosmopolis had already put this idea into practice: a significant number of contributors wrote in a language that was not their own, while those who did write in their own language addressed a non-native audience. The geopolitical implications of this multilingual approach come to the fore most emphatically in a case of pseudo-translation that deals with the case of Alsace-Lorraine. More subtly, the periodical creates echoes and reverberations between articles on international politics and works of literature. Through these translational practices, Cosmopolis was designed to foster a ‘diplomatic’ form of cosmopolitanism, a fact highlighted by the diplomatic credentials of a number of contributors, including the main editor, and thematised in short stories by Joseph Conrad and Henry James.

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Violence and the Pacifist Body in Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

Literary cosmopolitanism in the age of the League of Nations: Vernon Lee, Daniel Halévy and La Revue de Genève

Literary cosmopolitanism in the age of the League of Nations: Vernon Lee, Daniel Halévy and La Revue de Genève

Allegories on the international scene: Vernon Lee’s, Mina Loy’s, and Else Lasker-Schüler’s war plays

An Outpost of Modernism: The Diplomatic Design of Cosmopolis

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