Zoos': traveling exhibition of exotic animals. 9. Marie Corelli, pseudonym of Mary Mackay (1855-1924), best-selling (and royal favorite) English writer of romances and religious novels in which she aimed to reform social ills. 'Dickensian clowns': from the novels of English writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870). 1. Suburban district of London. '1/6': 18d, or a shilling and sixpence, then equivalent to about thirty-five cents.
2. Those blasted here range from individuals, such as Charles Burgess Fry, England's star cricket player and a tireless self-promoter, to things blasted seemingly for the thrill of doing so, such as codliver oil. Blasted, too, are institutions or members of the national, literary, or cultural establishment (e.g., the post office, a much-lauded model of Victorian efficiency, and the British Academy, established in 1902 by Royal Charter as the
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MINA LOY / 2015
national academy for humanities and social sciences), including various clergy and public leaders (e.g., Bishop of London; William Ralph Inge, dean of St. Paul's Cathedral; the Reverends Penny- feather and Meyer; R. J. Campbell, English Congregationalist minister in the City Temple of London, and a Pantheist; Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, archbishop of Westminster and superior of the Catholic Missionary Society; Norman Angell, pacifist British economist; Arthur Christopher Benson, schoolmaster at Eton College, author of Edward VII's coronation ode). Critics unfriendly to the avant-garde are also included (e.g., William Archer, drama critic for the Nation; Sir William Robertson Nicoll, biblical editor and sometime literary critic; Lionel Cust, director of the National Portrait Gallery and contributor to
the Dictionary of National Biography, etc.). Also blasted are artists and writers whom the Vorticists believed were meager talents in spite of their popularity (e.g., painter Frank Brangwyn, poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, actors George Grossmith and Seymour Hicks, composers Joseph Holbrooke and Edward Elgar, etc.), as well as those associated with fads (e.g., Sir Abdul Baha Bahai, leader of the Bahai faith) or idealistic social reform (e.g., author Marie Corelli; Sidney Webb, a leader of the Fabian Socialist organization; Annie Besant, theosophist and suffragist). Some names (e.g., Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore) are misspelled. For a detailed discussion of the cursing and blessing in Blast, see William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (1972).
MINA LOY
Mina Loy (1882?1966) was born in London to a Protestant mother and a Jewish father. She began her artistic career in the visual arts, but she later became an experimental poet, writing lyrics and long poems that created a stir because of their poetic, linguistic, and sexual iconoclasm. From 1899 to 1916 she lived and worked mostly in Munich, Paris, and especially Florence. She moved to New York in 1916 and to Paris in 1923, then settled in the United States in 1936.
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201 6 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS
Loy composed this manifesto, which she considered a rough draft and never published, in November 1914 and sent it to her friend Mabel Dodge (1879-1962), American author and celebrated patron of the arts. In the decade before she wrote it, feminist activism had intensified in England, particularly the militant civil disobedience of Christabel Pankhurst and other suffragettes in the Women's Social and Political Union. Loy's piece, which bears fruitful comparison with the masculine Blast manifesto published a few months earlier, was partly the result of Loy's quarrels with the Italian futurists, with whom she was closely associated despite the movement's misogyny. In the manifesto Loy tries to harness for feminism the radicalism and individualism of the avant-garde, calling for a complete revolution of gender relations. She abandons the suffragette movement's central issue of equality and insists instead on an adversarial model of gender, claiming that women should not look to men for a standard of value but should find it within themselves. First published in The Last Lunar Baedeker (1982), the manifesto is reprinted from The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996); both volumes were edited by Roger L. Conover.
For a sample of Loy's poetry, see 'Modernist Experiment' at Norton Literature Online.
Feminist Manifesto
The feminist movement as at present instituted is
Inadequate
Women if you want to realise yourselves?you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval?all your pet illusions must be unmasked?the lies of centuries have got to go? are you prepared for the Wrench?? There is no halfmeasure? NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is
Absolute Demolition
Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice- crusades & uniform education?you are glossing over
Reality.
Professional & commercial careers are opening up for you?
Is that all you want ?
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LOY: FEMINIST MANIFESTO / 201 7
And if you honestly desire to find your level without preju
dice?be Brave & deny at the outset?that pathetic clap-trap war cry Woman is the
equal of man
She
NOT!
The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a social code which is a protectorate of the feminine element?
is no longer masculine The women who adapt themselves to a theoretical valuation of their sex as a relative impersonality , are not yet Feminine
