Ordinary Matters

Modernist Women's Literature and Photography

Lorraine Sim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501346453
• eBook ISBN: 9781501314339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Shortlisted for the 2017 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship Ordinary Matters is the first major interdisciplinary study of the ordinary in modernist women's literature and photography. It examines how women photographers and writers including Helen Levitt, Lee Miller, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson envision the sphere of ordinary life in light of the social and cultural transformations of the period that shaped and often radically re-shaped it: for example, urbanism, instrumentalism, the Great Depression and war. Through a series of case studies that explore such topics as the street, domestic things, gesture and the face, Sim contends that the paradigmatic shifts that define early twentieth-century modernity not only inform modernist women's aesthetics of the everyday, but their artistic and ethical investments in that sphere. The everyday has been noted as a "keynote of the New Modernist Studies" (Todd Avery). Ordinary Matters comprises a vital contribution to recent scholarship on the topic and will be of value to scholars working in British and American modernism, multimedia modernisms, photography, twentieth-century literature, and critical and cultural histories of the everyday.

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• Introduction: Ordinary matters, modernity and women’s modernism
• 1 ‘I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone’: The street in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage
• 2 Extraordinary actuality: Helen Levitt’s streets
• 3 Homely things: Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf
• 4 Mrs Brown and the face-to-face
• 5 Dorothea Lange: On photographing the familiar
• 6 Banalities of evil: Lee Miller’s ethics of seeing war
• Coda: Margaret Monck and the labour of the everyday
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright