Women Making Modernism

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.

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.

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.

Contributors from the UK, Canada, and the US demonstrate how different methodologies and approaches can be used to reveal the woman artist as a "subject" of histories of 20th-century art. They offer specific case studies of historical narratives, artworks, and individual artistic projects within modernism. Topics include women artists and suffrage cultures, gender and representation in the Harlem Renaissance, and the question of decadence in 1923. Paper edition (unseen), $27.95. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

As authors and publishers, individuals and collectives, women significantly shaped the modernist movement. While figures such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein have received acclaim, authors from marginalized communities and those who wrote for mass, middlebrow audiences also created experimental and groundbreaking work. The essays in this volume explore formal aspects and thematic concerns of modernism while also challenging rigid notions of what constitutes literary value as well as the idea of a canon with fixed boundaries. The essays contextualize modernist women's writing in the material and political concerns of the early twentieth century and in life on the home front during wartime. They consider the original print contexts of the works and propose fresh digital approaches for courses ranging from high school through graduate school. Suggested assignments provide opportunities for students to write creatively and critically, recover forgotten literary works, and engage with their communities.

Women, Modernism, and Performance is an interdisciplinary 2004 study that looks at a variety of texts and modes of performance in order to clarify the position of women within - and in relation to - modern theatre history. Considering drama, fiction and dance, as well as a range of performance events such as suffrage demonstrations, lectures, and legal trials, Penny Farfan expands on theatre historical narratives that note the centrality of female characters in male-authored modern plays but that do not address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant garde. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Edith Craig, Radclyffe Hall and Isadora Duncan, Farfan identifies different objectives, strategies, possibilities and limitations of feminist-modernist performance practice and suggests how the artists in question transformed the representation of gender in art and life.

This book brings fresh perspectives on the works of celebrated modernists Georgia O’Keeffe, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, illuminating some of the artistic and cultural parallels and common themes between American and Australian modernism while exploring each artist’s unique contribution to international developments of modernism.

Meskimmon asks why women artists were left out of the canon of German modernism, tracing the reasons to the construction of a unified (male) history of art that in effect denied women a voice. The book is an effort to reconceive the period's art history and the perspective of the Weimar woman artist.