Interrogating Lesbian Modernism

Makiko Minow coined the phrase 'lesbian modernism' in 1989. Since then, scholars of lesbian modernism have produced crucial work to critique and expand the modernist canon. At the same time, there has been ongoing critical debate about what constitutes a lesbian modernist text, who counts as a lesbian modernist author, and how lesbian modernism relates to queer and trans modernism. This edited volume presents twelve newly commissioned chapters that reassess and interrogate the meanings, uses and limitations of lesbian modernism by exploring a broad range of authors, genres and histories. Individual chapters investigate what work the concept of 'lesbian modernism' has done in the past, how its boundaries have been defined and contested, and what voices have been included and excluded. As a whole, the book demonstrates how the concept of lesbian modernism can be mobilised in new and meaningful ways to continue to inform and enrich modernist studies.

The first book-length study to explore the importance of genre fiction for the body of literature we call lesbian modernismElizabeth English explores the aesthetic dilemma prompted by the censorship of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Faced with legal and financial reprisals, women writers were forced to question how they might represent lesbian identity and desire. Modernist experimentation has often been seen as a response to this problem, but English breaks new ground by arguing that popular genre fictions offered a creative strategy against the threat of detection and punishment. Her study examines a range of responses to this dilemma by offering illuminating close readings of fantasy, crime, and historical fictions written by both mainstream and modernist authors. English introduces hitherto neglected women writers from diverse backgrounds and draws on archival material examined here for the first time to remap the topography of 1920s-1940s lesbian literature and to reevaluate the definition of lesbian modernism.Key Features:Rethinks the lesbian modernist project to demonstrate that genre fiction not only influenced modernist writers such as Woolf and Stein but also found its way into their ostensibly highbrow workBrings to light hitherto neglected mainstream writers working in popular genres who contributed to the lesbian modernist aestheticSituates Katharine Burdekin within the context of lesbian modernism for the first time, employing hitherto unseen archive material (including letters and manuscripts)Divided into three broad multi-author genres (fantasy, historical and detective fictions), the study covers popular fictions such as utopian writing, the supernatural, historical biography, historical romance, and the classic country-house crime novel

This text analyzes the legal, social and literary impact of lesbian scandal on early twentieth-century British and Anglo-American culture.

While W. B. Yeats’s influential account of the ‘Tragic Generation’ claims that most fin-de-siècle poets died, or at least stopped writing, shortly after 1900, this book explodes this narrative by attending to the twentieth-century poetry produced by women poets Alice Meynell, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Dollie Radford, and Katharine Tynan. While primarily associated with the late nineteenth century, these poets were active in the twentieth century, but their later writing is overlooked in modernist-dominated studies, partly due to this poetry’s adherence to traditional form. This book reveals that these poets, far from being irrelevant to modernity, used these established forms to address contemporary concerns, including suffrage, sexuality, motherhood, and the First World War. The chapters focus on Meynell’s manipulations of metre to contemplate temporality and literary tradition; Michael Field’s use of blank verse to portray the conflicted modern woman; Radford’s adaptation of the aesthetic song-like lyric to tackle the experience of the city, urban crime, and suffrage; and Tynan’s employment of the ballad to soothe bereaved mothers during the First World War. This book ultimately shows that traditional forms played a vital role in shaping mature women poets’ responses to modernity, illuminating debates about form, tradition, and gender in twentieth-century poetry.

In a lecture delivered before the University of Oxford’s Anglo-French Society in 1936, Gertrude Stein described romance as “the outside thing, that . . . is always a thing to be felt inside.” Hannah Roche takes Stein’s definition as a principle for the reinterpretation of three major modernist lesbian writers, showing how literary and affective romance played a crucial yet overlooked role in the works of Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. The Outside Thing offers original readings of both canonical and peripheral texts, including Stein’s first novel Q.E.D. (Things As They Are), Hall’s Adam’s Breed and The Well of Loneliness, and Barnes’s early writing alongside Nightwood. Is there an inside space for lesbian writing, or must it always seek refuge elsewhere? Crossing established lines of demarcation between the in and the out, the real and the romantic, and the Victorian and the modernist, The Outside Thing presents romance as a heterosexual plot upon which lesbian writers willfully set up camp. These writers boldly adopted and adapted the romance genre, Roche argues, as a means of staking a queer claim on a heteronormative institution. Refusing to submit or surrender to the “straight” traditions of the romance plot, they turned the rules to their advantage. Drawing upon extensive archival research, The Outside Thing is a significant rethinking of the interconnections between queer writing, lesbian living, and literary modernism.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism brings unique literary, critical, and historical perspectives to the relationship between women’s writing and women’s rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present. Thematically organised around five central concepts—Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism—the Companion tracks vital questions and debates, offering fresh perspectives on changing priorities and enduring continuities in relation to women’s ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. This groundbreaking collection brings into focus the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the formation of British literary feminisms, including the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Empire. From the political novel of the 1790s to early twentieth-century suffrage theatre and contemporary ecofeminism, and from the mid-Victorian antislavery movement to anti-fascist activism in the 1930s and working-class women’s writing groups in the 1980s, this book testifies to the diverse and dynamic character of the relationship between literature and feminism. Featuring contributions from leading feminist scholars, the Companion offers new insights into the crucial role played by women’s literary production in the evolving history of women’s rights discourses, feminist activism, and movements for gender equality. It will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of women’s writing, British literature, cultural history, and gender and feminist studies.

Who is taken seriously as an artist? What does gender have to do with it? Is there a relationship between artistic creation and physical procreation? In Masculine Pregnancies, Aimee Armande Wilson argues that modernist writers used depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to answer these questions. The book places "masculine pregnancies" in works by Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound in the context of interwar debates about eugenics, immigration, midwifery, and sexology in order to redefine the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism. Attending to recent developments in queer theory, Wilson challenges the critical assumption that figures of masculine pregnancy necessarily reinforce oppressive norms. The book's first half shows how some writers indeed used such figures to delegitimize artists who were not white, male, and heterosexual. The second half then shows how others used masculine pregnancies to extend legitimacy to mannish women, dark-skinned immigrants, and their (pro)creations—and did so a century before the current boom in queer pregnancy narratives.

A critical reading of sexually radical fiction by British women in the years during and after World War I. Gay Wachman examines work by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf and Radclyffe Hall, along with the less well known Clemence Dane, Rose Allatini and Evadne Price. These writers, she states, created a modernist literary tradition -one that functioned both within and against the repressive ideology of the British Empire.