Cottrell, Joanne Louise (2024) Vorticist women, cosmopolitanism, and the cosmofeminist spaces of resistance. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Cottrell J, final thesis for library.pdf - Full Version Download (104MB) | Preview |
Abstract
In 1914 Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders were the only women among the eleven signatories of the Vorticist manifesto in Blast, yet they have been neglected in the historiographies of English modernism, their involvement in the Vorticist project viewed as peripheral and further distorted by critical interpretations of the visual material produced by their male counterparts. Taking as a prompt the dynamics of William Roberts’s painting The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915, and drawing attention away from its compositional arrangement towards the setting in which the group gathering is presented, this thesis adopts a spatial approach to Vorticism and gender. Composed of two parts, part one centres on London as the nexus of modernist endeavour in England to firmly position the artists under scrutiny as cosmopolitan women active in the city in promotion of a distinctly English art form. By charting their interactions with the communal spaces of the avant-garde, their discreet presence is traced, exposing dialogues and performative strategies that strengthen their agency as independent artists in a male-dominated milieu. Part two signals a shift from the physical sites of modernism towards textual and abstract space to argue for its significance as a mechanism for the channelling of the personal and the political as a means of empowerment and a source protection. Drawing on new material from the archive and diverging from preoccupation with their anomalous position within Vorticism as women towards a deeper concern with them as cosmopolitans in collective revolt against the insular philistinism of English culture, this project at the same time exposes, through close attention to individual aesthetic strategies, cosmofeminist spaces of resistance in which personal desires and anxieties can be safely confronted, and as such offers a fresh assessment of the women as visible participants within Vorticism’s constellation of ideas.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Oct 2024 08:29 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Oct 2024 13:56 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54441 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00054441 |
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