Awards

• Winner of Shortlisted, Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.
• Winner of Winner, Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize Shortlisted, 2023 University English Book Prize.
• Winner of Winner, Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize Winner, 2023 University English Book Prize.
• Winner of Winner, Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.

Overview

This volume argues that aphorism represents a tool for the social management of emotion. Rhetorically corralled into a slick, collectable shape, the aphorism promises arresting and instantaneous epiphany. However, the accomplished elegance which positions the aphorism's message as self-evidently true in fact works to repel further enquiry, and ultimately ensures that it will be forgotten or bypassed in favour of another aphorism: no less eagerly embraced for the earlier disappointment. Aphorism, therefore, is a form in which dangerous ideas and emotions can be safely displayed and, simultaneously, effaced. Because aphorism's style defuses the imperative to act on what is clearly known, writers like Stevie Smith can use the form to stage a withdrawal from the burden of making an impact on the world.This book finds that Smith's use of aphorism and its related forms (proverb, epitaph, caption, and fragment) offers a route into her texts. With her disconcerting pen-and-ink drawings, dark comedy, and social ventriloquism which stops short of satire, the rhetorical force of Smith's poetry fascinates and arrests its readers, but nevertheless leaves them unable to react coherently or identify the use-value which her writing appears to promise. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archival material, this project argues that Smith's texts resist analysis because, like the aphorisms embedded throughout them, they offer and exemplify a mode of clearly-declared revelation which, at the same time, makes itself unusable.

Full Product Details

9780192895899

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Reviews

Masud has given her readers a coherent and rich interpretive framework for a poet whose combination of flatness, lightness, weight, and excess have proven difficult to explain. And she has delivered this in refreshingly witty, figuratively lively prose-the work is such a pleasure to read. * Lauryl Tucker, The Review of English Studies *

Author Information

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. She works on aphorism, flatness, puppets, and nonsense.

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