1st Edition

Gender and Modernism: Critical Concepts 4 vols Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies

Edited By Bonnie Kime Scott
    1544 Pages
    by Routledge

    Modernism, whether seen as a period designation, a manifestation of formal experimentation, or an aspect of modernity, has since its inception been marked, consciously or unconsciously, by gender. The dates 1890-1940, typically accepted as encompassing the modernist period, coincide with the first wave of feminism and its educational, suffragist, socialist, and professional agendas. Feminist activism and ideology of the period, as well as reactions against them, made gender a field of contention, sometimes labelled the "sex wars." The long shadow left by the Oscar Wilde trials, and the flourishing of gay and lesbian cultures, particularly in the urban centres of modernism in the teens and twenties, also queered normative notions of masculinity and femininity. In response to global consumer culture, diverse images of the modern girl emerged, also putting conventional notions of gender to the test. The Harlem Renaissance had its own gendered politics and expressions, as did modernism’s venturing into and emergence from colonial situations around the globe.

    The discussion of gender in modernism arose in the 1970s, along with the second wave of feminism and the introduction of feminist theory and criticism to the academy. It challenged the ways that the modernist canon, and the experimental forms associated with modernism, had been fashioned as normatively male. Early on, various approaches to the exploration of gender were available, including the gendering of style available in French Feminist theory, psychoanalytic approaches, materialist feminism, and gyno-critical attention to women writers. Raising questions of gender concerning modernist texts had become an expectation by the 1990s. Debates about the adequacy of gender as the central concern of feminist theory have led to the useful concept of intersectionality, which heeds the ways that other social categories, such as race, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and global/colonial location, intersect with gender in creating the standpoint of an individual. Equally valuable are challenges to binary divisions encouraged by gendered oppositions, and the study of ways that gender is produced by culture or performed.

    Volume I: Modernists Write Gender

    Issues of Gender and Formal Authority

    1. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Our Vortex’, BLAST, 1, 1, 1914, 147–9.

    2. Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, Pavannes and Divisions (Alfred A. Knopf, 1918), pp. 95–100.

    3. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Egoist, 6, 4, 1919, 72–3.

    4. Rebecca West, ‘What is Mr T. S. Eliot’s Authority as a Critic?’, Daily Telegraph, 30 Sept. 1932, p. 6.

    5. Ernest Hemingway, ‘Miss Stein Instructs’, A Moveable Feast (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), pp. 11–21.

    6. James Joyce, ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, Fortnightly Review, 67, 1 Apr. 1900, 575–90.

    7. E. M. Forster, The Feminine Note in Literature [1910], ed. George Piggford (Cecil Woolf, 2001), pp. 17–20, 21–9, 30–2.

    8. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Hogarth Press, 1929), pp. 24–38.

    9. Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (Wishart & Co., 1934), pp. 39–46.

    Dark Places of Psychology, Biology, and Sexology

    10. Otto Weininger, ‘Emancipated Women’ [1906], in Daniel Steuer (ed.), Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 57–65.

    11. Havelock Ellis, ‘Feminism and Masculinism’ [1917], Essays in War-Time: Further Studies of the Task of Social Hygiene (Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 88–100.

    12. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (Doubleday, 1990), pp. 436–7.

    13. Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, trans. Joan Riviere, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13, 1932, 281–97.

    14. May Sinclair, ‘The New Mysticism’, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions (Macmillan, 1917), pp. 240–89.

    15. H. D., ‘Notes on Thought and Vision’, Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho (City Lights Books, 1982), pp. 17–53.

    Gender Politics: Emancipation, Suffrage, Sexual Choice, and Anti-Censorship

    16. Grant Allan, ‘The Girl of the Future’, The Universal Review, 7, 25, 1889, 49–64.

    17. Mina Loy, ‘Feminist Manifesto’ [1914], in Roger L. Conover (ed.), The Last Lunar Baedeker (Jargon Society, 1982), pp. 269–71.

    18. Jane Harrison, ‘"Homo Sum": Being a Letter to an Anti-Suffragist from an Anthropologist’ (National College Equal Suffrage League, 1912), pp. 3–30.

    19. Djuna Barnes, ‘How it Feels to be Forcibly Fed’, New York: Djuna Barnes (Sun & Moon Press, 1989), pp. 174–9.

    20. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Matriarchy’ [1928], in James T. Boulton (ed.), The Works of D. H. Lawrence: Late Essays and Articles (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 103–6.

    21. Margaret Sanger, ‘Woman’s Error and her Debt’, Woman and the New Race (Brentano’s, 1920), pp. 1–8.

    22. Margaret Sanger, ‘Two Classes of Women’, Woman and the New Race (Brentano’s, 1920), pp. 47–56.

    23. Jane Heap, ‘Art and the Law’, The Little Review, 7, 3, 1920, 5–7.

    24. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ [1930], in James T. Boulton (ed.), The Works of D. H. Lawrence: Late Essays and Articles (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 236–53.

    Racial Expressions and Transgressions

    25. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, ‘The Damnation of Women’, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (AMS Press, 1969), pp. 163–86.

    26. Elise Johnson McDougald, ‘The Task of Negro Womanhood’, in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro (Atheneum Macmillan, 1992), pp. 369–82.

    27. Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How it Feels to Be Colored Me’ [1928], in Alice Walker (ed.), I Love Myself When I am Laughing … And Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (The Feminist Press, 1979), pp. 152–5.

    28. Nancy Cunard, ‘Josephine Baker: Some Gleanings from the French Critics’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (Wishart & Co., 1934), p. 329.

    29. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Colored Girls of Passenack: Old and New’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (Wishart & Co., 1934), pp. 93–6.

    30. Rene Crevel, ‘The Negress in the Brothel’, trans. Samuel Beckett, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (Wishart & Co., 1934), pp. 354–6.

    31. Heba Jannath, ‘America’s Changing Color Line’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (Wishart & Co., 1934), pp. 83–9.

    On the Colonial Horizon

    32. Jean Rhys, ‘Meta’, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 22–4.

    33. Beatrice Hastings, ‘The Young Race of the Veld’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (Wishart & Co., 1934), pp. 651–3.

    34. Hazel Balance Eadie, ‘Virgin Island Negroes’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (Wishart & Co., 1934), pp. 494–6.

    35. Elspeth Huxley, ‘African Vista’, in Anthony Lejeune (ed.), Time and Tide Anthology (Andre Deutsch, 1956), pp. 39–44.

    Fashions and Forms in Film and Dance

    36. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Women and the Future’, Vanity Fair, 22, 2, Apr. 1924, 39–40.

    37. H. D., ‘The Cinema and the Classics I: Beauty’, Close Up, 1, 1, July 1927, 22–33.

    38. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance: The Film Gone Male’, Close Up, 9, 1, Mar. 1932, 36–8.

    39. Iris Barry, ‘Conventions and Morals’, Let’s Go to the Movies (Arno Press, 1972), pp. 143–59.

    40. Rose Macaulay, ‘Following the Fashion’, Personal Pleasures (Macmillan, 1936), pp. 231–6.

    41. Margaret Morris, ‘Health and Physical Exercise’, Margaret Morris Dancing (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co Ltd, 1928), pp. 11–33.

    Volume II: Critical Gender Studies of Modernism: The Makings of Modernism

    Reading Gender into Modernist Canons

    42. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘Tradition and the Female Talent: Modernism and Masculinism’, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 125–62.

    43. Bonnie Kime Scott, ‘Introduction’, The Gender of Modernism (Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 1–18.

    44. Gail McDonald, ‘Through Schoolhouse Windows: Women, the Academy, and T. S. Eliot’, in Cassandra Laity and Nancy K. Gish (eds.), Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 175–94.

    Issues of Sexual Textuality

    45. Elaine Showalter, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny’, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 263–97.

    46. Toril Moi, ‘Introduction: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Feminist Readings of Woolf’, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (Methuen, 1985), pp. 1–18.

    47. Julia Kristeva, ‘The Semiotic and the Symbolic’, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 25–30, 68–88, 239–41, 249–51.

    48. Marianne DeKoven, ‘(Anti-) Canonical Modernism’, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 179–207.

    49. Susan Squier, ‘Sexual Biopolitics in Man’s World: The Writings of Charlotte Haldane’, in Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (eds.), Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889–1939 (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 137–55.

    Modernism, Gender, and War

    50. Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great War’, Signs, 8, 3, 1983, 422–50.

    51. James Longenbach, ‘The Women and Men of 1914’, in Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier (eds.), Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 97–123.

    Productive and Contested Spaces

    52. Shari Benstock, ‘Discoveries’, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 3–36.

    53. Jayne E. Marek, ‘Making Their Ways: Women Editors of "Little" Magazines’, Women Editing Modernism: ‘Little’ Magazines & Literary History (University Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 1–22.

    54. Janet Lyon, ‘Modernists and Gatekeeping Manifestoes: Pound, Loy, and Modern Sanctions’, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 140–67.

    55. Jane Beckett and Deborah Cherry, ‘Reconceptualizing Vorticism: Women, Modernity, Modernism’, BLAST: Vorticism 1914–1918 (Ashgate, 2000), pp. 59–71, 127–31.

    Volume III: Critical Gender Studies of Modernism: Diversity of Discourse and Context

    Gender, Genre, and Discourse

    56. Suzanne Clark, ‘The Sentimental and the Modern: A Common History’, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 19–41.

    57. Celeste M. Schenck, ‘Exiled by Genre: Modernism, Canonicity, and the Politics of Exclusion’, in Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (eds.), Women’s Writing in Exile (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 225–50.

    58. Cary Nelson, ‘The Fate of Gender in Modern American Poetry’, in Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (eds.), Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 321–60.

    59. Krista Ratcliffe, ‘Minting the Fourth Guinea: Virginia Woolf’, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 32–64.

    60. Caroline Webb, ‘The Room as Laboratory: The Gender of Science and Literature in Modernist Polemics’, in Lisa Rado (ed.), Modernism, Gender and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach (Garland Publishing, 1997), pp. 337–52.

    Modernisms of the Masses, and in Visual and Kinetic Arts

    61. Lisa Rado, ‘The Case for Cultural/Gender/Modernist Studies’, in Lisa Rado (ed.), Modernism, Gender and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach (Garland, 1997), pp. 3–14.

    62. Carolyn Kitch, ‘Dangerous Women and the Crisis of Masculinity’, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 56–74.

    63. Bridget Elliott, ‘The "Strength of the Weak" as Portrayed by Marie Laurencin’, Genders, 24, 1996, 69–109.

    64. Jean Gallagher, ‘H. D.’s Distractions: Cinematic Stasis and Lesbian Desire’, MODERNISM/modernity, 9, 3, 2002, 407–22.

    65. Paula Rabinowitz, ‘Great Lady Painters, Inc.: Icons of Feminism, Modernism, and the Nation’, in Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston (eds.), Modernism, Inc: Body, Memory, Capital (New York University Press, 2001), pp. 193–218.

    66. Dee A. Reynolds, ‘Dancing Free: Women’s Movements in Early Modern Dance’, in Lisa Rado (ed.), Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach (Garland Publishing, 1997), pp. 247–79.

    Decolonizing Modernism

    67. Laura E. Donaldson, ‘A Passage to "India"’, in Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 88–101.

    68. Jane Marcus, ‘Britannia Rules The Waves’, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 59–85.

    69. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Geopolitical Literacy: Internationalizing Feminism at "Home"—The Case of Virginia Woolf’, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 107–31, 260–6.

    70. Mark Wollaeger, ‘Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out’, MODERNISM/modernity, 8, 1, 2001, 43–75.

    Volume IV: Critical Gender Studies of Modernism: Diversity of Identities

    Gender in Semicolonial Ireland

    71. Suzette Henke, ‘Stephen Dedalus and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Misogynist’, in Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (eds.), Women and Joyce (University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 82–107.

    72. Marjorie Howes, ‘That Sweet Insinuating Feminine Voice: Hysterics, Peasants and the Celtic Movement’, in Yeats’ Nations: Gender, Class, Irishness (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 16–43.

    73. Joseph Valente, ‘"Neither Fish nor Flesh"; or How "Cyclops" Stages the Double-Bind of Irish Manhood’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 96–127.

    Racial Intersections with Gender

    74. Nellie Y. McKay, ‘The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), Reading Black, Reading Feminist (Meridian, 1990), pp. 227–43.

    75. Cheryl A. Wall, ‘On Being Young—A Woman—and Colored: When Harlem Was in Vogue’, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 1–32.

    76. Hortense Spillers, ‘Notes on an Alternative Model—Neither/Nor’, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 301–31.

    77. Pauline DeSouza, ‘Black Awakening: Gender and Representation in the Harlem Renaissance’, in Katy Deepwell (ed.), Women Artists and Modernism (Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 55–69.

    Sexualities

    78. Lillian Faderman, ‘The Spread of Medical "Knowledge"’, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (William Morrow, 1981), pp. 314–31.

    79. Leslie A. Hall, ‘Feminist Reconfigurations of Heterosexuality in the 1920s’, in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds.), Sexology in Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 135–49.

    80. Tim Armstrong, ‘Making a Woman’, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 159–83.

    Cultural Expectations, Performances, and Evasions of Gender

    81. Christine Froula, ‘Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5, 1986, 63–90.

    82. Jessica R. Feldman, ‘On the Divide: Cather’s Dandy’, Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 143–79.

    83. Laura Doan, ‘Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in the 1920s’, Feminist Studies, 24, 3, 1998, 663–700.

    84. Pamela Caughie, ‘Passing as Modernism’, MODERNISM/modernity, 12, 3, 2005, 385–406.

    Biography

    Bonnie Kime Scott is Professor of Women's Studies at San Diego State University, where she teaches courses concerning women writers, feminist theory, gender, and representation. Her writing over the last decade has been devoted to the feminist re-vision of literary modernism and she is currently working on a sequel to The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, which originally came out in 1990.