Gendered Modernisms
Subtitle: American Women Poets and Their Readers
Contributors: Margaret Dickie (Editor); Thomas Travisano (Editor)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: March 1996
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 321
ISBN-13: 9780812215502
Subjects: Poetry & poets; Women's studies; Women and literature; Literary Criticism; American poetry; Literature - Classics / Criticism; American English; English; USA; Poetry; American - General; Women authors; 20th century; History; History and criticism; Modernism (Literature); United States
First sentence: Read today in the context of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or Wallace Stevens's "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" or William Carlos Williams's "To Elsie," Gertrude Stein's "Ada," Tender Buttons, and "Lifting Belly" appear remarkably free from the anxiety, restraint, and misogyny that dominate the sexual attitudes of texts by the male modernists.
Description: An American poetic modernism that includes the works of women writers emerges as something far richer than the male-dominated movement whose contours have been so often charted. Gendered, modernism reaches to the political left as well as to the right. Gendered, modernism contends with questions of sexuality, eroticism, and pornography, as well as domesticity and sentimentality. Gendered, modernism can configure issues of race and class from the position of the deracinated and dispossessed.

Gendered, modernism becomes sexier, more violent, more personal, more subversive.

Gendered Modernisms offers thirteen original essays on Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gwendolyn Brooks, demonstrating how consideration of these women expands the social, textual, and political boundaries of modernism.

The collection places these poets in the context of their times, examining the conditions that helped shape their vivid and diverse poetic careers and reconsidering some of the assumptions that have led to their exclusion from the main narratives of modernist poetry. Ultimately, the book's aim is to enlarge the literary history of the movement - for gendered, modernism extends backward to the first years of the century, and forward to the beginnings of postmodernism in the 1960s.