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Richard Aldington's Images, the Metropolis, and the Masses

Frayn, Andrew

Authors



Abstract

Richard Aldington’s city poems in the latter part of his 1915 collection Images
are concerned with the masses who inhabit the modern city. Aldington is
at pains to stress his distinction from those he perceives as an increasingly
homogenized crowd. This paper examines the literary, linguistic and rhetorical
strategies by which Aldington ‘others’ the masses, and sets them in the context
of contemporary studies of the crowd, focusing on the work of Gustave Le Bon
and C. F. G. Masterman. Aldington’s poetry is a product of the environment
he sees as unsatisfactory, but he searches for solutions in a range of literary
traditions which write the city.

Citation

Frayn, A. (2014). Richard Aldington's Images, the Metropolis, and the Masses. Modernist Cultures, 9(2), 260-281. https://doi.org/10.3366/mod.2014.0086

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date 2014-10
Deposit Date May 30, 2016
Publicly Available Date May 30, 2016
Print ISSN 2041-1022
Electronic ISSN 1753-8629
Publisher Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed Not Peer Reviewed
Volume 9
Issue 2
Pages 260-281
DOI https://doi.org/10.3366/mod.2014.0086
Keywords city, crowd, Imagism, homogeneity, elitism
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/10014
Contract Date May 30, 2016

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