Niall started following the work of 2 people.
Niall started following the work of Sarah Thwaites, University of East Anglia, Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
Niall started following the work of Jenny Barrett, Edge Hill University, English & History.
Department Member, English
Thesis Title: Hart Crane's Queer, Modernist Aesthetic
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Dr. Alex Goody
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About
My thesis explores how queerness and modernism - sometimes regarded as contradictory areas - dovetail in the work of the American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932).
In particular, I explore how Crane's queerness can be traced back to a form of American decadence, influenced by Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, a decadence that emerged also through Imagism.
I look at how Crane's strong visual sensibility, given form in a number of the poems of his 1926 collection 'White Buildings', draws upon his relationships with a number of visual artists such as William Sommer and Alfred Stieglitz, highlighting his aspiration towards a synthetic form of artistic production that generously embraces, rather than excludes. Crane's understanding of a 'self-evident' spatial form directly informs his poetic form, and, I suggest, challenges preconceived notions of his linguistic 'obscurity'.
The thesis also reads Crane's love poetry sequence 'Voyages' genetically, charting the changes from draft to draft in order to explore the ways in which Crane's queer aesthetic disrupts normative time and sociality, affirming (sexual) experience over knowledge, and involving mystical teachings to challenge Eliot's concept of the 'individual talent'.
