May Sinclair’s Romantic Corpus
This paper explores May Sinclair’s Modernist appropriation of Romantic tropes and experimentations. As a literary critic, Sinclair (1863-1946) wrote influential papers on Modernist poetry, but barely mentions Romantic poets in her many essays. By contrast, her own narrative poem, The Dark Night (192...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte"
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Sillages Critiques |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/16447 |
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| Summary: | This paper explores May Sinclair’s Modernist appropriation of Romantic tropes and experimentations. As a literary critic, Sinclair (1863-1946) wrote influential papers on Modernist poetry, but barely mentions Romantic poets in her many essays. By contrast, her own narrative poem, The Dark Night (1924), articulates Eliotian references with Romantic themes (Dowson 2006). This influence is even more remarkable in her fiction. Her characters’ poetic references have little to do with contemporary Imagist and Vorticist experimentations; instead, Sinclair’s novels insistently mention the same eclectic poetic corpus, wherein British Romanticism, including several poems by Shelley, Byron, Keats and Wordsworth, plays a major role. In Mary Olivier’s Bildung (Mary Olivier: A Life, 1919), for instance, Mary’s assimilation of Romantic poems deeply resonates with her discoveries of pantheism, sensuality and rebellion, true to Sinclair’s own interests in spirituality and philosophical idealism. Sinclair’s marked interest in Romantic poetry suggests a little-known continuum between Romanticism and Modernism. In Mary Olivier, the numerous quotes and gloss of Romantic poems become a textual network that forms an interesting counterpoint to the Modernist aesthetics of fragmentation. As the main character Mary is caught in Shelley’s “Adonais,” her reading provides her with powerful images and an endless soundscape that help her escape oppressive Victorian institutions. Romantic texts become ingrained in the character’s individuation process and provide her with new landmarks that help her redefine her identity. The Romantic corpus brings on a new relation to nature as well as a sense of artistic filiation that shape the character’s Modernist self. |
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| ISSN: | 1272-3819 1969-6302 |