Academic literature on the topic 'Dorothy Richardson'

This article examines the challenges experimental writing poses for textual editing, drawing on the experience of the Dorothy Richardson Editions Project, which was inaugurated in 2007 with the aim of producing new scholarly editions of Richardson's fiction and letters. Here we focus on Richardson's thirteen-volume novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–67) and the particular problems its constantly unfolding experimental aesthetic present for both the critic and the scholarly editor. We adopt Adorno's concept of ‘constructive methods’ to describe Richardson's project, the composition of a narrative without a predictable endpoint, asking what kind of editorial practice best captures her unconventional and deliberately inconsistent approach to writing. We conclude by discussing the implications that editing Pilgrimage might have for a broader understanding of modernist aesthetics.

This article offers a survey of the recently discovered scrapbooks collated over a number of decades by the Yorkshirewoman Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819). The large set of thirty-five volumes presents an important collection of press cuttings relating to the history and consequences of the French Revolution, and also contains ‘historical and miscellaneous’ material of a more eclectic nature. I argue that the texts significantly improve our understanding of Dorothy Richardson’s position as a reader, writer and researcher working in the North of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, her set of albums raises important questions about the relationship between commonplacing and scrapbooking practices, and the capacity of such textual curatorship to function as a form of both political engagement and autobiographical expression.

La musique dans Pilgrimage de Dorothy Richardson joue un rôle important. C'est avant tout un élément crucial dans la quête identitaire de la protagoniste, Miriam Henderson. Récit de la formation d'une artiste, Pilgrimage est aussi celui de la quête d'une identité religieuse, nationale et féminine de la protagoniste. La musique accompagne le récit et offre la possibilité à Miriam de (ré)évaluer sa relation aux différentes religions organisées, de redéfinir son anglicité et de construire une identité féminine authentique. La musique ouvre également la voie à la « joie indépendante », au « centre de son être » où se loge une identité préexistante sur laquelle repose l'identité authentique qu'elle cherche. Par ailleurs, la musique aide Richardson à rompre avec la tradition romanesque du dix-neuvième siècle et à exprimer sa défiance à l'égard du langage et sa capacité à représenter la « réalité ». En intégrant les principes musicaux à la construction du texte narratif, l'auteur met en valeur son désir d'utiliser la musique comme modèle du fonctionnement sémiotique du texte narratif, d'influer sur la façon dont celui-ci fait sens et le communique en réfractant la « réalité » sur un axe à la fois vertical et horizontal et présente ainsi sa conception du temps comme échappant à la division entre passé, présent et futur. En outre, Richardson a recours à la musique pour mieux représenter la conscience, le processus de réflexion et le monde intérieur de sa protagoniste. Enfin, l'accompagnement musical sollicite la coopération de la conscience créatrice du lecteur en s'assurant sa collaboration dans la construction de la « réalité » que le roman tente de représenter
Music plays an important role in Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson. On the one hand, music is a crucial element in the protagonist's search for identity. Reading Pilgrimage as a story of a quest and the formation of an artist shows that the quest of the protagonist Miriam Henderson is also that of a religious, national and feminine identity accompanied by music. Music provides the protagonist with the opportunity to (re)assess her relationship with various organized religions, redefine her Englishness, and build an authentic female identity. Music also reveals the “independent joy,” at “the center of being,” where a pre-existing identity can be found upon which the authentic identity that Miriam seeks rests. On the other hand, Richardson relies on music to break with the nineteenth-century writing conventions and express her distrust in the capacity of language to render “reality.” Her effort to integrate musical principles in the construction of the narrative emphasizes her desire to use music as a model for the semiotic functioning of the text, to influence how the text makes sense and communicates it refracting “reality” on an axis, both vertical and horizontal, thus presenting her concept of time which is outside the division into past, present and future. Furthermore, Richardson uses music to represent consciousness, the thinking process, and the inner world of the protagonist. Finally, the musical accompaniment generates the cooperation of the reader's creative consciousness securing his collaboration in the construction of the “reality” that the novel is trying to represent

By the early twentieth century, the epistemology oftime had become a question of an individual's changing perceptions. In this context, Dorothy Miller Richardson (1873-1957) provided one of the most striking studies of an individual's varying perceptions of time in her magnum opus, the multi-volume Pilgrimage (published 1915-1967). Frequently overlooked as a theorist of time, Richardson developed innovative literary techniques to represent this new understanding of the variable quality of temporal perception. Drawing on her affinity with film for its ability to disrupt linear chronology, Richardson appropriated cinematic devices and the experience of the silent cinema into Pilgrimage. By choosing a technique that combines notions of time, human mentality, and cinema-and the implicit relationships between philosophy, art, and science-Richardson contributes to the very definition of "modernism." This thesis incorporates Richardson's unpublished and published literary and film theory into her predominant works, including but too often limited to Pilgrimage and her column in the film journal Close Up, in order to provide a more detailed contextual and theoretical explanation of Richardson's cinematic writing. This explanation reveals that her fiction and non-fiction mutually support her position that certain cinematic themes--change, silence, and openness to interpretation-express temporal perception. This intertextual analysis is also a method of providing Richardson studies a contextual interpretation of Richardson's Close Up articles, now widely available. This examination grounds Richardson's cinematic fiction in her own philosophy in order to illuminate the consistent themes throughout her works. As Richardson's philosophy corresponds with and diverges from philosopher Henri Bergson's ideas on time and the cinema, it concludes that the problems with articulating temporal perception reside in verbal language. The temporal capacities of the "language" of film explain Richardson's motivation to transform cinematic devices into literary techniques. This thesis will analyze her use of specific cinematic devices throughout Pilgrimage, supported by her philosophy on the cinematic nature of existence. This analysis reveals that Richardson's cine-literary theory was shared by the writer Gertrude Stein, who unknowingly complements Richardson's approach by privileging the temporal abilities of cinematic "language" over traditional verbal language. Outlining Richardson's equation of silence with free contemplation, this thesis also reinterprets her feminism as her push towards both human intellectual freedom and the emancipation of her own identity. Ultimately, this thesis's intertextual reconstruction of Dorothy Richardson's identity inaugurates her as an analyst ofmodemity, substantiating the contextual relevance of this single-author study and providing a methodology for bringing neglected authors like Richardson out of obscurity.

The association of women and mysticism this century is not always perceived as a positive one. In Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (1995), the feminist philosopher of religion, Grace Jantzen, suggests that the experience of mysticism gradually became defined as an ineffable, private emotional encounter in order to remove it from the sphere of political management of society and religion. She writes of a direct increase of association between mysticism and women, who were permitted to have spiritual experiences, but powerless to speak with authority about their insights. Jantzen's view of this association of women with mysticism is therefore somewhat negative; she warns of mysticism's ability to silence and disempower. But as women mystics, particularly in the medieval period, have spoken and written of their (often vivid and imaginative) experiences with authority, this thesis explores how ideas about mysticism have been addressed by women writers this century. In particular, 1investigate whether the women writers treated in this thesis developed the definition of such spiritual experience in a more affirmative and expressive way than Jantzen suggests. Rather than assuming that mysticism is an unchanging spiritual experience within a strictly religious context, this thesis explores how women writers discovered a creative expression of their inner spirituality through the inspiration of contemporary ideas about mysticism, and how they helped to move these ideas on. I introduce my argument, therefore, by examining constructions of mysticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the idea of mysticism was defined and developed both in terms of experiential philosophy and of psychology. In particular, the attention paid to the emotional effects of a "mystical experience" became associated, by William James, with the importance of what he termed the "subliminal realm" of the mind, a realm which would subsequently be defined as the unconscious by Freud, but which James saw as a valid channel for imagination and spirituality As well as drawing attention to the "subliminal realm" and its role in spiritual experience, James first suggested the idea of the "stream of consciousness", a term which became important for much modernist literature, but which James did not link directly with the expression of mysticism. Not all psychological studies of mysticism were as open-minded as James'; I also look at texts which were hostile and eclectic in turn. And James himself was not immune to contemporary prejudice regarding gender. But the period's general interest in the imaginative workings of the mind, flowing from the unconscious into consciousness, and the struggle to express this imaginative process, has led me to the study of its literature in order to explore how such ideas about mysticism were used, by women writers, within a creative context. Evelyn Underhill provides a link between the areas of religious thought and women's fiction writing. Underhill in fact started her writing life as a novelist, exploring those themes of spirituality which she was later, more famously, to address in texts such as Mysticism, in which James' ideas are acknowledged. Importantly, Mysticism was certainly read by two women writers - May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson - who, while fascinated by mysticism, were equally concerned to develop the novelistic form in order to allow the expression of individual consciousness. They were also interested in the subject of gender to a greater degree than was Underhill. By examining the work first ofMay Sinclair, whose mysticism is chiefly concerned with loss, then of Dorothy Richardson, who was to develop the mystical concepts of vision and illumination, I trace the progression of mysticism's influence in women's writing, an influence which Underhill had to a large extent initiated. Underhill, Sinclair and Richardson were not the only women writers to explore mysticism alongside stylistic innovation and an awareness of gender issues. There was, for example, Virginia Woolf, whose aunt, Caroline Stephen, was a respected Quaker. But rather than continue to explore all the women writing in this period, a task too large for this thesis, I move on to show how ideas about mysticism, gender and writing have developed in later thinkers. In examining the ideas of the feminist critics Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva, I show that mysticism, and the ways of articulating what James termed an "ineffable" experience, are even more strongly linked with gender and innovative creative writing in their work, whether "novelistic" in a strict sense or not. I have not anal.vsed the work ofUnderhill. Sinclair, and Richardson solely. in terms of psychoanalytically acute feminist criticism I, although I introduce such Such work is generally available: Jean Radford's examination of PiIbTfi mauc. for example critical ideas where appropriate, and have shown that these writers point towards the critical concepts of later feminist writers and thinkers. My emphasis is on the particular space lor creativity which mysticism develops and towards which psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the talking curehas indicated but paid less attention to than the aetiology and symptoms of madness and hysterical disorders. Rather than continue to pursue this psychoanalytical preoccupation, I have looked at the work of the later feminist critics as experimental mystical writers in their own right, and I suggest that it is mysticism. rather than hysteria or other forms of "madness", which has provided the creative space for gendered exploration of imagination and writing. Just as psychoanalytic criticism seeks to explore those "moments of vision" which madness has been said to facilitate in writers such as Woolf I have set out to show that the insights of mysticism, classed as neither mental illness nor rigorous rationality, have played an essential part in the development of women's fiction-writing, criticism and religious thought this century, allowing, additionally, the closer relationship of these three disciplines. In concluding this thesis therefore, I examine the way in which mysticism has provided a place for "visionary" gendered discourse in contemporary theology, and return to the area of religious thought, where I had begun my research. I examine ways in which there is now an increased awareness of the imagination in feminist theology and, specifically, in mysticism within a feminist theological context. The developments of mysticism's creative space have facilitated this awareness in theology, just as they have in the fiction and criticism through which I have traced its influence. Although the question of what constitutes mysticism and who counts as a mystic may remain open (plurality being one of the emphases of feminist critical thought), the conclusion of this thesis affirms that the space of spiritual creativity developed by mysticism has been one of the major forces to have shaped women's writing and critical thought (both literary and religious) this century.

This thesis considers the method and motivation of the self-representation of the author as a literary artist-hero in the autobiographical sequences of Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson, and in particular it traces the parallels between these texts and the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman. In so doing, I show that the tropes and themes of the Künstlerroman genre assist the autobiographers’ representation of artistic identity in a period of increasingly fragmented conceptions of selfhood. Underlying my hermeneutic approach is the concept of literary inheritance as a movement from tradition to individual innovation, reflected in a motif of the parent-child relationship, and in autobiographical tropes, and language usage. These are traced in each text under review and weave together issues of historical context, genre innovation, and literary self-invention. The three authors demonstrate a shared preoccupation with the role of life experience in the creation of art, and with the interconnection of personality and style. This study concludes that an understanding of the relation of the artist to the literary account of their own life creates a challenge to poststructuralist perceptions of the gap between author and text. The introduction outlines the particular relevance of the historical moment between 1910 and 1920 for the study of these autobiographical works. Chapter one presents my methodological approach in relation to pertinent autobiography theory and provides an overview of the Künstlerroman genre, its transference from German to English literature, and the changing intentions of autobiographers between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as demonstrated in Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. Chapters two and three consider James’s A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years, while chapters four and five examine Sassoon’s The Old Century and Seven More Years, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey. These four chapters analyse the narrative technique employed in each case and its intimate relationship with the authors’ self-image. Chapter six focuses on the stylistic innovations of Richardson’s Pilgrimage. The conclusion then addresses the idea that ‘style is the man himself’, that a second ‘portrait’ can be read in the formal choices made in the text’s construction, and, as a result, considers the particular role of autobiographical writing for our reading of the artist.

This thesis explores colour as a philosophical means of transit between literature and the visual arts. I explore a new way of thinking about the self and about thought, developmg the significance of colour alongside, and internal to, modes of representation in the modernist movement. The interaction of art and literature is crucial to much debate on modernist aesthetics. DevelopIng the debate into the history of colour phenomena, I argue that colour aHows a philosophical inflection to certain clich6s (such as stream-of-consciousness) that are attached to modernist writing. In the work of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Richardson and TS Eliot, I argue that the modernist preoccupation with the seeming unpasse between thought and representation can be seen to be 'made visible' through the theme of colour. Colour is a vehicle through which to explore the relation between thought and perception, subject and object, and offers a new way of engagement with recent research into theoretical comparisons between thinking, writing and visual arts.