Framing Pieces takes as its starting point the premise that the frames of modern art - the notes, marginalia, critical essays, and longer prose pieces with which James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound surrounded their texts - perform complex aesthetic and socio-political work. John Whittier-Ferguson discusses a variety of texts and contexts, including Finnegan's Wake, A Room of One's Own, The Pargiters, Three Guineas, and Pound's prose and poetry from the 1930s. He argues that the study of twentieth-century apparatus is crucial to the comprehension of the text it brackets and of the self-conscious, self-promoting, and self-elucidating and obscuring nature of the moderns gathered in this book.
Whittier-Ferguson introduces his inquiry with a discussion of the paradigmatic instance of the modernist apparatus, Eliot's notes to The Waste Land. From there, he leads his readers into an exploration of questions central to the study of modernism today. He considers the political inflections of Modernist texts and traces the uncertain domain of the avant-garde. Further, Whittier-Ferguson determines the means by which writers make claims to different forms of cultural authority and demonstrates the ways an author's designs are themselves ultimately framed by historical forces that resist all designing.
Turning his readers' attention to the margins of canonical modernism, Whittier-Ferguson newly illuminates authors and texts central to an understanding of twentieth-century art and culture.
Industry Reviews
"Whittier-Ferguson's topic--the modernists' desire to control or confound the ways in which their own texts were received--is precise, but his rangy, speculative argument will interest anyone wanting to speak more precisely about the political valence of literary texts. Elegantly written, thoughtfully conceived, Framing Pieces will help set the agenda for modernist studies well into the next century; but it will also offer insights--and pleasures--that
no reader should miss."--James Longenbach, University of Rochester
"The reader of Framing Pieces is left with the sense of a prodigiously competent and professional piece of work...To produce such an even-handed reading across the deeply entrenched authorial territories of such canonical modernist figures, whilst producing at least something of interest to specialists in each of those territories, is in itself a tour de force.--James Joyce Literary Supplement
"Whittier-Ferguson's presentation of this set of texts and activities helps us to see a great deal about the making of modernism, and particularly about the handling of its obscurities."--Woolf Studies Annual
"Well-written in clear, direct language, the study sparkles at times with the author's humor...Scholars of modernism as well as scholars of bibliographic and textual studies will find the volume a rewarding study."--English Language Notes
"...Framing Pieces is a fine book which students of modernism in general--and of Joyce, Pound, and Woolf in particular--will enjoy, learn from, and find a valuable corrective to much recent work....Framing Pieces is a book well worth our attention."--Modern Philology
"Whittier-Ferguson's topic--the modernists' desire to control or confound the ways in which their own texts were received--is precise, but his rangy, speculative argument will interest anyone wanting to speak more precisely about the political valence of literary texts. Elegantly written, thoughtfully conceived, Framing Pieces will help set the agenda for modernist studies well into the next century; but it will also offer insights--and pleasures--that
no reader should miss."--James Longenbach, University of Rochester
"The reader of Framing Pieces is left with the sense of a prodigiously competent and professional piece of work...To produce such an even-handed reading across the deeply entrenched authorial territories of such canonical modernist figures, whilst producing at least something of interest to specialists in each of those territories, is in itself a tour de force.--James Joyce Literary Supplement
"Whittier-Ferguson's presentation of this set of texts and activities helps us to see a great deal about the making of modernism, and particularly about the handling of its obscurities."--Woolf Studies Annual
"Well-written in clear, direct language, the study sparkles at times with the author's humor...Scholars of modernism as well as scholars of bibliographic and textual studies will find the volume a rewarding study."--English Language Notes
"...Framing Pieces is a fine book which students of modernism in general--and of Joyce, Pound, and Woolf in particular--will enjoy, learn from, and find a valuable corrective to much recent work....Framing Pieces is a book well worth our attention."--Modern Philology
