Green, Michael John; (2022) Thinking Back: Artistic Returns to H.D. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines the emergence of the modernist writer H.D. as a creative touchstone for feminist-led artistic practice in the 1970s and 1980s. I focus on the artists Joan Jonas and Nancy Spero, as well as the experimental filmmakers Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. By locating H.D. in their work, I trace a history of co-emergence for H.D., one that takes place in parallel to her surfacing by and for feminist literary studies in those same decades. I explore why H.D. became important for this group of artists and filmmakers and for the concerns of feminism at the time. In doing so, I suggest that a different understanding of influence and artistic lineage is necessary in order to account for these creative interactions, one not exclusively beholden to Oedipal or generational models. My opening chapter begins this exploration by foregrounding the ‘H.D. Scrapbook’, a neglected object in H.D.’s corpus. Locating the collaborative at play across the scrapbook’s pages and in its production, I move towards a new theoretical vocabulary through which to account for the collaborative mode within the scrapbook and between artist and writer in the proceeding chapters. For this, Luce Irigaray’s work on sexual difference and a sex which is ‘at least two’ is foundational. My second chapter examines Jonas’s investment in H.D.’s early Imagist poetry as a performance- and image-making strategy, and her turn to H.D.’s late epic poetry and analysis with Freud in order to take up the question of war. My third chapter, on Spero, also looks at her reach to H.D.’s epic poetry and, specifically, its revisionary impulse and women-centred mythmaking. My final chapter places Mulvey and Wollen’s first two films in dialogue with H.D.’s involvement in British and European film culture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, particularly the journal Close Up.

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