'Modernist' Women Writers and Narrative Art

'Modernist' Women Writers and Narrative Art PDF

Author: Kathleen Wheeler

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1994-09

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0814792766

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This book is an examination of the narrative strategies and stylistic devices of modernist writers and of earlier writers normally associated with late realism. In the case of the latter, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Willa Cather are shown to have engaged in an ironic critique of realism, by exploring the inadequacies of this form to express human experience, and by revealing hidden, and contradictory, assumptions. By drawing upon insights from feminist theory, deconstruction and revisions of new historicism, and by restoring aspects of formalist analysis, Kathleen Wheeler traces the details of these various dialogues with the literary tradition etched into structural, stylistic and thematic elements of the novels and short stories discussed. These seven writers are not only discussed in detail, they are also related to a literary tradition of dozens of other women writers of the twentieth century, as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Stevie Smith and Jane Bowles are shown to take the developments of the earlier three writers into full modernism.

Women Artists and Writers

Women Artists and Writers PDF

Author: B. J. Elliott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1317762142

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In this beautifully illustrated and provocative study, Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace reappraise women's literary and artistic contribution to Modernism. Through comparative case studies, including Natalie Barney, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Gertrude Stein, the authors examine the ways in which women responded to Modernism and created their artistic identity, and how their work has been positioned in relation to that of men. Bringing together women's studies, visual arts and literature, Women Writers and Artists makes an important contribution to 20th century cultural history. It puts forward a powerful case against the academic division of cultural production into departments of Art History and English Studies, which has served to marginalize the work of female Modernists.

Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement

Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement PDF

Author: Jody Cardinal

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1498582915

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Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement explores the role of social and political engagement by women writers in the development of American modernism. Examining a diverse array of genres by both canonical modernists and underrepresented writers, this collection uncovers an obscured strain of modernist activism. Each chapter provides a detailed cultural and literary analysis, revealing the ways in which modernists’ politically and socially engaged interventions shaped their writing. Considering issues such as working class women’s advocacy, educational reform, political radicalism, and the global implications for American literary production, this book examines the complexity of the relationship between creating art and fostering social change. Ultimately, this collection redefines the parameters of modernism while also broadening the conception of social engagement to include both readily acknowledged social movements as well as less recognizable forms of advocacy for social change.

Fictions of Authority

Fictions of Authority PDF

Author: Susan Sniader Lanser

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780801480201

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Annotation Writing from positions of cultural exclusion, women have faced constraints not only upon the "content" of fiction but upon the act of narration itself. Narrative voice thus becomes a matter not simply of technique but of social authority: how to speak publicly, to whom, and in whose name. Susan Sniader Lanser here explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. Drawing upon narratological and feminist theory, Lanser sheds new light on the history of "voice" as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining social power.

Women Making Modernism

Women Making Modernism PDF

Author: Erica Gene Delsandro

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2020-01-06

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0813057302

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Challenging the tendency of scholars to view women writers of the modernist era as isolated artists who competed with one another for critical and cultural acceptance, Women Making Modernism reveals the robust networks women created and maintained that served as platforms and support for women’s literary careers. The essays in this volume highlight both familiar and lesser-known writers including Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, Emma Goldman, May Sinclair, and Mary Hutchinson. For these writers, relationships and correspondences with other women were key to navigating a literary culture that not only privileged male voices but also reserved most financial and educational opportunities for men. Their examples show how women’s writing communities interconnected to generate a current of energy, innovation, and ambition that was central to the modernist movement. Contributors to this volume argue that the movement’s prominent intellectual networks were dependent on the invisible work of women artists, a fact that the field of modernist studies has too long overlooked. Amplifying the reality of women’s contributions to modernism, this volume advocates for an “orientation of openness” in reading and teaching literature from the period, helping to ease the tensions between feminist and modernist studies.

Modernist Women Writers and War

Modernist Women Writers and War PDF

Author: Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0807146617

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In Modernist Women Writers and War, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick examines important avant-garde writings by three American women authors and shows that during World Wars I and II a new kind of war literature emerged -- one in which feminist investigation of war and trauma effectively counters the paradigmatic war experience long narrated by men. In the past, Goodspeed-Chadwick explains, scholars have not considered writings by women as part of war literature. They have limited "war writing" to works by men, such as William Butler Yeats's poem "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" (1919), which relies on a male perspective: a pilot contemplates his forthcoming flight, his duty to his country, and his life in combat. But works by Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein set in wartime reveal experiences and views of war markedly different from those of male writers. They write women and their bodies into their texts, thus creating space for female war writing, insisting on female presence in wartime, and, perhaps most significantly, critiquing war and patriarchal politics, often in devastating fashion. Goodspeed-Chadwick begins with Barnes, who in her surrealist novel Nightwood (1936) emphasizes the actual perversity of war by placing it in contrast to the purported perverse and deviant behavior of her main characters. In her epic poem Trilogy (1944--1946), H.D. validates female suffering and projects a feminist, spiritual worldview that fosters healing from the ravages of war. Stein, for her part, in her experimental novel Mrs. Reynolds (1952) and her long love poem Lifting Belly (1953), captures her experience of the everyday reality of war on the home front, within the domestic economy of her household. In these works, the female body stands as the primary textual marker or symbol of female identity -- an insistence on women's presence in both the text and in the world outside the book. The strategies employed by Barnes, H.D., and Stein in these texts serve to produce a new kind of writing, Goodspeed-Chadwick reveals, one that ineluctably constructs a female identity within, and authorship of, the war narrative.

Dissensuous Modernism

Dissensuous Modernism PDF

Author: Allyson C. DeMaagd

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0813070023

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Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, this book shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing.

H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913-1946

H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913-1946 PDF

Author: Georgina Taylor

Publisher: Oxford English Monographs

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780198187134

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This book locates H.D. within an Anglo-American 'public sphere' of women writers, a discursive arena in which individuals come together in debate and discussion. The theoretical framework used is that outlined in Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, modified inorder to consider this group as a 'counter-public sphere', a non-dominant group whose interests were non-identical to those of the dominant public sphere.From 1913 a network of little magazines enabled women writers to come together in unprecedented numbers in public exchange. The ethos of this public sphere was a challenge to all convention, including challenges to the perceived sentimentality of earlier women's writing; H.D.'s Imagism was crucialin this. Initially this public sphere avoided engagement with the wider socio-political world, focusing instead on psychic reality. Writing became increasingly experimental in a new wave of avant-garde activity, fuelling heated debate in the magazines around the nature of 'literature'.By the mid 1920s this particular literary sphere had lost direction, but continued to experiment and seek new ways forward. New discussions around cinematic forms (in which H.D. participated) kept critical discussion very much alive. In the 1930s the work emerging from this network was increasinglypolitically aware. This was a period of highly disturbed writing such as H.D.'s Nights and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, internalizations of the sadomasochism enacted on the world stage.After the war, this public sphere declined into personal exchanges in letters and private circulation of manuscripts.

Contemporary American Women Writers

Contemporary American Women Writers PDF

Author: Catherine Rainwater

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0813182999

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Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Anne Redmon, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker all seem to be especially concerned with narrative management. The ten essays in this book raise new and intriguing questions about the ways these leading women writers appropriate and transform generic norms and ultimately revise literary tradition to make it more inclusive of female experience, vision, and expression. The contributors to this volume discover diverse narrative strategies. Beattie, Dillard, Paley, and Redmon in divergent ways rely heavily upon narrative gaps, surfaces, and silences, often suggesting depths which are lamentably absent from modern experience or which mysteriously elude language. For Kingston and Walker, verbal assertiveness is the focus of narratives depicting the gradual empowerment of female protagonists who learn to speak themselves into existence. Ozick and Tyler disrupt conventional reader expectations of the "anti-novel" and the "family novel," respectively. Finally, Morrison's and Piercy's works reveal how traditional narrative forms such as the Bildungsroman and the "soap opera" are adaptable to feminist purposes. In examining the writings of these ten important women authors, this book illuminates a significant moment in literary history when women's voices are profoundly reshaping American literary tradition.

From the Modernist Annex

From the Modernist Annex PDF

Author: Karin Roffman

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2010-05-13

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0817316981

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In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the majority of women were forced to seek their education outside the walls of American universities. Many turned to museums and libraries, for their own enlightenment, for formal education, and also for their careers. In Roffman’s close readings of four modernist writers—Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, and Ruth Benedict—she studied the that modernist women writers were simultaneously critical of and shaped by these institutions. From the Modernist Annex offers new and critically significant ways of understanding these writers and their texts, the distribution of knowledge, and the complicated place of women in modernist institutions.