Binckes, F (2026) 'Tightropes of our hope: manifestos, magazines, anthologies.' In: Potter, J and Jenkins, L, eds. Bloomsbury handbook to modernism and war. Bloomsbury, London. (Forthcoming)
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This chapter explores how modernist periodical culture allowed women to occupy – and in some cases transform -- hostile aesthetic territory at various points between 1914 and 1945. This was a period when feminist militancy intersected with the lingering impact of Futurism, the manifesto-driven movement whose pro-colonialism, “scorn for women” and emphasis on war as “the world’s only hygiene” connected the metaphorical militarism of the avant-garde with the experience of global conflict. The 1915 ‘War Number’ of the “quintessential modernist little magazine” BLAST (Mark Morrisson) will act as a starting point. This number represents many of the issues central to the chapter – the collision between a conflictual aesthetic and actual conflict, the juxtaposition of art and war enabled by the magazine form, and the spaces available to women along the faultlines of both. After this, chapter will turn to longer-running modernist venues The Egoist and The New Age, both sites of contested female editorship and reflections on ‘the sex war’. In a series of editorials in The Egoist in 1914, Dora Marsden unpicked the conceptual underpinnings of wartime sentiment, using theories honed by her experience of, and argument with, suffragist activism. I will read this alongside two parallel accounts of life in Paris in the same year: art critic Muriel Ciolkowska’s 1914 war diary ‘Fighting Paris’ (also in The Egoist) and Beatrice Hastings’s New Age column ‘Impressions of Paris’. I will argue their periodical context allowed these pieces to disrupt both the conventions of experimental modernist form and of mainstream journalism, foregrounding women’s lived experience to critique both war and art. Following this thread of dissent, the chapter will then sample some of the periodical networks of modernism and Surrealism from the later 1920s and 1930s, which processed the tumult and growing violence of the era using a similarly embodied idiom. The chapter will conclude with women’s contributions to the Vichy-era, anti-colonial Surrealist magazine Tropiques (1941 – 1943), recognised as a landmark text of the Second World War and the wider Caribbean liberation struggle. I will argue that twenty-first century re-engagements with Tropiques— and in particular with editor and critic Suzanne Césaire-- point to the continued relevance of this experimental textual culture to the defining battles of our own era.
| Item Type: | Book Chapter or Section |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | war, modernism, periodicals, anthologies, manifestos |
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PR English literature |
| Divisions: | School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities |
| Research Centres and Groups: | Making Books: Creativity, Print Culture, and the Digital Research Centre |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Jul 2025 15:13 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Jul 2025 15:13 |
| URN: | https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/17135 |
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