Modernist Women And Visual Cultures

This study offers an original approach to modernist visual aesthetics, drawing on a range of photographic and visual theory, psychoanalytic theories of the visual and modernist criticism as well as on original archive research. The book covers the domestic photography of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, the cinema writing of Colette, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Bryher and the role of the visual in Virginia Woolf's image/text Three Guineas. Throughout, there is a concern with women's ways of looking and a critical exploration of how gendered subjectivities are visually constructed.

This volume takes some of the visual aspects of modernism - photo albums and image-texts - and examines the ways in which modernist women explore a freer range of aesthetics in their work.

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.

In this beautifully illustrated and provocative study, Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace reappraise women's literary and artistic contribution to Modernism. Through comparative case studies, including Natalie Barney, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Gertrude Stein, the authors examine the ways in which women responded to Modernism and created their artistic identity, and how their work has been positioned in relation to that of men. Bringing together women's studies, visual arts and literature, Women Writers and Artists makes an important contribution to 20th century cultural history. It puts forward a powerful case against the academic division of cultural production into departments of Art History and English Studies, which has served to marginalize the work of female Modernists.

A revised and fully updated edition, featuring five new chapters reflecting recent scholarship on Woolf.

Applying a feminist and international approach to the interwar years (1918-1939), this collection explores women's art in a variety of mediums including design, print, illustration, murals, poster art, costume design, film, sculpture, and painting. These essays place a central concern on the history and theory of art and gender and have a coherent focus on women's role in the agency and mediation of artistic production between the wars.

Women played a central role in literary modernism, theorizing, debating, writing, and publishing the critical and imaginative work that resulted in a new literary culture during the early twentieth century. This volume provides a thorough overview of the main genres, the important issues, and the key figures in women's writing during the years 1890–1945. The essays treat the work of Woolf, Stein, Cather, H. D. Barnes, Hurston, and many others in detail; they also explore women's salons, little magazines, activism, photography, film criticism, and dance. Written especially for this Companion, these lively essays introduce students and scholars to the vibrant field of women's modernism.

An exploration of women?s contributions to visual culture in major urban centres between the wars (1918-1939), this collection sheds new light on women?s relationships with the processes of modernism and modernization. Women?s work in a variety of mediums is explored, including design, print, illustration, murals, poster art, and costume design, as well as more conventional forms of painting and sculpture. International in scope, the volume discusses artists and exhibitions from the United Kingdom, Greece, Mexico, France, Ireland and the United States. The contributors place a strong emphasis on archival research yet each addresses contemporary concerns in feminist art history. By focusing on a very specific time period, the essays place a central concern on the history and theory of art and gender and are united by their coherent focus on women?s role in the agency and mediation of artistic production in the interwar period.