This article argues that the modern museum offered modernist writer H.D. an institutional context through which she negotiated the possibilities for women’s experiences of—and participation in—otherwise exclusionary narratives of cultural history. In the novel Asphodel and the epic poem Trilogy, her personae’s affective, local experiences of historical art and artifacts in museums (and museological spaces) contest the authority of the disinterested “pure gaze” assumed by the museum’s ideal seeing subject. In these works, the museum functions as a space for cultural engagements and revaluations that provide H.D.’s personae access to voices and histories that museum collections then commonly neglected: those of women as artistic creators and interpreters.
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Research Article|
December 01 2016
The Muse in the Museum: Cultural Institutions and Aesthetic Experience in H.d.’s Asphodel and Trilogy
Twentieth-Century Literature (2016) 62 (4): 379–402.
Citation
Frank Capogna; The Muse in the Museum: Cultural Institutions and Aesthetic Experience in H.d.’s Asphodel and Trilogy. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2016; 62 (4): 379–402. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-3764022
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