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Distributed for UCL Press

The Modernist Bestiary

Translating Animals and the Arts with Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy and Graham Sutherland

Distributed for UCL Press

The Modernist Bestiary

Translating Animals and the Arts with Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy and Graham Sutherland

The Modernist Bestiary centres on Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée (1911), a multimedia collaborative work by French-Polish poet Guillaume Apollinaire and French artist Raoul Dufy, and its homonym, The Bestiary or Procession of Orpheus (1979), by British artist Graham Sutherland. Rather than reconstructing the lineage of these two compositions, the book uncovers the aesthetic and intellectual processes involved that operate in different times, places and media. The Apollinaire and Dufy Bestiary is an open-ended collaboration, a feature that Sutherland develops in his re-visiting, and this book shows how these neglected works are caught up in many-faceted networks of traditions and genres. The contributors’ encounters with these works take the form of poetry and essays, all moving freely between different disciplines and practices, humanistic and posthumanist critical dimensions, as well as different animals and art forms. They draw on disciplines ranging from music, art history, translation, Classical poetry, and French poetry, and are nurtured by approaches including phenomenology, cultural studies, sound studies, and critical animal studies. Collectively the book shows that the aesthetic encounter, by nature effective, is by nature also interdisciplinary and motivating and that it spurs the critical in addressing the complex issues of 'human animality'.
 

170 pages | 49 color plates | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2020

Free digital open access editions are available to download from UCL Press.

Comparative Literature and Culture


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Table of Contents

Headpiece: Oblique and prolonged Timothy Mathews Chapter 1. Graham Sutherland The Bestiary or Procession of Orpheus: An introduction Dawn Ades Chapter 2. The Voice of Light: Nature and revelation in The Bestiary, or Procession of OrpheusSarah Kay Chapter 3. Ombre terreuse: Shades of meaning in Vergil, Ovid and Apollinaire Sarah Spence Chapter 4. Apollinaire’s octosyllabic quatrain, translation and zoopoetics Clive Scott Chapter 5. Animals on Parade: Collecting sounds for l’histoire naturelle of modern music Rachel Mundy Chapter 6. Beasts of Flesh and Steel: The post-industrial bestiaries of Apollinaire, Dufy and Sutherland Matthew Senior Chapter 7. How is Orpheus honoured? Procession, association and loss Timothy Mathews Notes Towards A Hybrid Bestiary: Out of Apollinaire, Sutherland and others  George Szirtes Tailpiece Sarah Kay

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