Modernism Feminism And The Culture Of Boredom

Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. Whether in popular offerings such as Robert Hitchens's The Garden of Allah, the esteemed middlebrow novels of May Sinclair or H. G. Wells, or now-canonized works such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, women's boredom frequently serves as narrative impetus, antagonist and climax. In this book, Allison Pease explains how the changing meaning of boredom reshapes our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, feminism's struggle to define women as individuals and male modernists' preoccupation with female sexuality. To this end, Pease characterizes boredom as an important category of critique against the constraints of women's lives, arguing that such critique surfaces in modernist fiction in an undeniably gendered way. Engaging with a wide variety of well- and lesser-known modernist writers, Pease's study will appeal especially to researchers and graduates in modernist studies and British literature.

Modernism, Sex, and Gender is an up-to-date and in-depth review of how theories of gender and sexuality have shaped the way modernism has been read and interpreted from its inception to the present day. The volume explores four key aspects of modernist literature and criticism that have contributed to the new modernist studies: women's contributions to modernism; masculinities; sexuality; and the intersection of gender and sexuality with politics and law. Including brief case studies of such writers as May Sinclair and Radclyffe Hall, this book is a valuable guide for those looking to understand the history of critical thought on gender and sexuality in modernist studies today.

This companion provides students and scholars alike with an interdisciplinary approach to literary modernism. Through essays written on a range of cultural contexts, this collection helps readers understand the significant changes in belief systems, visual culture, and pastimes that influenced, and were influenced by, the experimental literature published around 1890-1945.

During a modern age that saw the expansion of its democracy, the fading of its empire, and two world wars, Britain's hereditary aristocracy was pushed from the centre to the margins of the nation's affairs. Widely remarked on by commentators at the time, this radical redrawing of the social and political map provoked a newly intensified fascination with the aristocracy among modern writers. Undone by history, the British aristocracy and its Anglo-Irish cousins were remade by literary modernism. Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege is about the results of that remaking. The book traces the literary consequences of the modernist preoccupation with aristocracy in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and others writing in Britain and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. Combining an historical focus on the decades between the two world wars with close attention to the verbal textures and formal structures of literary texts, Adam Parkes asks: What did the decline of the British aristocracy do for modernist writers? What imaginative and creative opportunities did the historical fate of the aristocracy precipitate in writers of the new democratic age? Exploring a range of feelings, affects, and attitudes that modernist authors associated with the aristocracy in the interwar period—from stupidity, boredom, and nostalgia to sophistication, cruelty, and kindness—the book also asks what impact this subject-matter has on the form and style of modernist texts, and why the results have appealed to readers then and now. In tackling such questions, Parkes argues for a reawakening of curiosity about connections between class, status, and literature in the modernist period.

Winner of the 2020 Comics Studies Society Edited Book Prize Contributions by Kylie Cardell, Aaron Cometbus, Margaret Galvan, Sarah Hildebrand, Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Tahneer Oksman, Seamus O’Malley, Annie Mok, Dan Nadel, Natalie Pendergast, Sarah Richardson, Jessica Stark, and James Yeh In a self-reflexive way, Julie Doucet’s and Gabrielle Bell’s comics, though often autobiographical, defy easy categorization. In this volume, editors Tahneer Oksman and Seamus O’Malley regard Doucet’s and Bell’s art as actively feminist, not only because they offer women’s perspectives, but because they do so by provocatively bringing up the complicated, multivalent frameworks of such engagements. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and worldview, the essays in this book investigate their shared investments in formal innovation and experimentation, and in playing with questions of the autobiographical, the fantastic, and the spaces in between. Doucet is a Canadian underground cartoonist, known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary. Meanwhile, Bell is a British American cartoonist best known for her intensely introspective semiautobiographical comics and graphic memoirs, such as the Lucky series and Cecil and Jordan in New York. By pairing Doucet alongside Bell, the book recognizes the significance of female networks, and the social and cultural connections, associations, and conditions that shape every work of art. In addition to original essays, this volume republishes interviews with the artists. By reading Doucet’s and Bell’s comics together in this volume housed in a series devoted to single-creator studies, the book shows how, despite the importance of finding “a place inside yourself” to create, this space seems always for better or worse a shared space culled from and subject to surrounding lives, experiences, and subjectivities.

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.

New perspectives on women's contributions to periodical culture in the era of modernismThis collection highlights the contributions of women writers, editors and critics to periodical culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores women's role in shaping conversations about modernism and modernity across varied aesthetic and ideological registers, and foregrounds how such participation was shaped by a wide range of periodical genres. The essays focus on well-known publications and introduce those as yet obscure and understudied - including middlebrow and popular magazines, movement-based, radical papers, avant-garde titles and classic Little Magazines. Examining neglected figures and shining new light on familiar ones, the collection enriches our understanding of the role women played in the print culture of this transformative period.Key FeaturesHelps recover neglected women writers and cast new light on canonical onesHighlights the geographical diversity of modern British print cultureEmphasises the interdisciplinary nature of modernism, including essays on modernist dance, music, cinema, drama and architecture Includes a section on social movement periodicals

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.