Unmanning modernism
Subtitle: gendered re-readings
By: edited by Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson.
Contributors: Harrison, Elizabeth Jane, 1960-; Peterson, Shirley, 1950-
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press; Univ of Tennessee Pr
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Knoxville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 196
Subjects: English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc; Modernism (Literature) -- Great Britain; English literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc; American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc; American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc; Women and literature -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 20th century; Modernism (Literature) -- United States; Feminism and literature -- English-speaking countries; Sex role in literature; Canon (Literature)
Description: The essays in this collection explore the aesthetic similarities and differences between male and female constructions of modernism. The contributors draw on postmodern and feminist theory to discuss the works of both well-known and lesser-known writers, including Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, Lytton Strachey, Radclyffe Hall, Louise Bryant, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Arguing for a radical re-evaluation of the modernist aesthetic, the essayists consider how women writers created their own version of modernism through the use of sentimental and domestic subject matter, by writing about maternal concerns, and through experiments with plot, voice, and points of view.

The essays also interrogate the role of gender in modernist debates regarding high and low art and show how women writers responded to the anxiety of influence. An illuminating and multivocal commentary on the process of modern canon formation, Unmanning Modernism adds to the evolving critical concept of a gender-conscious and political modernism.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Millay's big book, or the feminist formalist as modern / Joseph Aimone; title: The sun born in a woman : H.D.'s transformation of a masculinist icon in The dancer / Dagny Boebel; title: Modernism and maternity : Alice Meynell and the politics of motherhood / Maria Frawley; title: Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Hunter Austin's ethnographic fiction : new modernist narratives / Elizabeth Jane Harrison; title: Gendering modernism : H.D., imagism, and masculinist aesthetics / Michael Kaufmann; title: Is Mary Llewellyn an invert? : the modernist supertext of The well of loneliness / Loralee Macpike; title: The hostess and the seamstress : Virginia Woolf's creation of a domestic modernism / Geneviève Sanchis Morgan; title: Modernism, single motherhood, and the discourse of women's liberation in Rebecca West's The judge / Shirley Peterson; title: Virginia Woolf as modernist foremother in Maureen Duffy's play A nightingale in Bloomsbury Square / Christine W. Sizemore; title: A modernist romance? : Lytton Strachey and the women of Bloomsbury / Julie Taddeo; title: "I do not participate in liberations": female dramatic and theatrical modernism in the 1910s and 1920s / Kornelia Tancheva; title: The unnatural object of modernist aesthetics : artifice in Woolf's Orlando / Suzanne Young.