“An Art of Individuals”: Dora Marsden’s literary anarchism and Pound’s aesthetic reflection in The New Freewoman

Abstract

The founder and editor of “Freewoman”/“The New Freewoman”/“The Egoist”, Dora Marsden was one of the leading figures on the London cultural scene in the years before ww1. Mirroring the evolution of her thought, the shift in the title of her magazines re ects her move from anarchist feminism to the adoption of an individualist philosophy that much owed to Stirner, Nietzsche and Bergson. Marsden’s radical subjectivism, her espousal of nominalism – with its rejection of universals, classes and abstractions that distort rather than reveal reality – connect her theoretical positions with the experience of movements such as imagism and vorticism. Starting from this premise, this essay focuses on a specific moment in Marsden’s aesthetic reflection, namely the debate on the function of art and literature that she developed with Ezra Pound in a series of articles published in “The New Freewoman”. The exchange sheds light on their complex network of mutual influences and shows how Marsden’s nominalistic polemic against all universals and abstractions and her rigorous philosophical egoism echo through imagist and vorticist critical language and propaganda.