Women Making Modernism

Erica Gene Delsandro

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780813057309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Making a Feminist Modernist Studies
• 1. Writing Modernist Women: Toward a Poetics of Insubstantiality
• 2. Modernism and Middlebrow through the Eyes of Object Studies
• 3. The Haunting of Mary Hutchinson
• 4. Peggy Guggenheim’s and Bryher’s Investment: How Financial Speculation Created a Female Modernist Tradition
• 5. Bringing Women Together, in Theory
• 6. Emma Goldman among the Avant-Garde
• 7. Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity
• 8. Virginia Woolf and Mina Loy: Modernist Affiliations
• 9. Iconic Shade . . . and Other Professional Hazards of Woolf Scholarship
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index