Women's Experience of Modernity 1875-1945

by Ardis, Ann L.; Lewis, Leslie W.

• ISBN13: 9780801869358
• ISBN10: 0801869358
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-12-30
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

In Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875--1945, literary scholars working with a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies move feminine phenomena from the margins of the study of modernity to its center. Analyzing such cultural practices as selling and shopping, political and social activism, urban field work and rural labor, radical discourses on feminine sexuality, and literary and artistic experimentation, this volume contributes to the rich vein of current feminist scholarship on the "gender of modernism" and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. During this period, "women's experience" was a rallying cry for feminists, a unifying cause that allowed women to work together to effect social change and make claims for women's rights in terms of their access to the public world -- as voters, paid laborers, political activists, and artists commenting on life in the modern world. Women's experience, however, also proved to be a source of great divisiveness among women, for claims about its universality quickly unraveled to reveal the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of various feminist activities and organizations. Complementing recent attempts to historicize literary modernism by providing more thorough analyses of its material production, the essays in this volume examine both literary and non-literary writings of Jane Addams, Djuna Barnes, Toru Dutt, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Pauline Hopkins, Emma Dunham Kelley, Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Bram Stoker, Ida B. Wells, Rebecca West, and others as discursive events that shape our conception of the historical real. Instead of focusing exclusively or even centrally on modernism and literature, these essays address a broad array of textual materials, from political pamphlets to gynecology textbooks, as they investigate women's responses to the rise of commodity capitalism, middle-class women's entrance into the labor force, the welfare state's invasion of the working-class home, and the intensified eroticization of racial and class differences. Contributors include: Ann L. Ardis, University of Delaware; Katherine L. Biers, University of Chicago; Clair Buck, Wheaton College; Lucy Burke, University of Manchester; Carolyn Burdett, University of North London; James Davis, Nassau Community College; Rita Felski, University of Virginia; Deborah Garfield, UCLA; Barbara Green, University of Notre Dame; Piya Pal-Lapinski, Bowling Green State University; Leslie W. Lewis, College of Saint Rose; Carla L. Peterson, University of Maryland; Francesca Sawaya, University of Oklahoma; Talia Schaffer, Queens College, CUNY; Alpana Sharma, Wright State University; Lynn Thiesmeyer, Keio University; Ana Parejo Vadillo, Birkbeck College, University of London; and Julian Yates, University of Delaware.

Author Biography

Ann L. Ardis is a professor of English at University of Delaware. She is the author of New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism and co-editor (with Bonnie Kime Scott) of Virginia Woolf Turning the Centuries: Selected Papers from the Ninth Annual conference on Virginia Woolf. Leslie W. Lewis is an associate professor of English at the College of Saint Rose.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(12)
Ann L. Ardis
Part I Negotiating the Literary Marketplace
Writing a Public Self: Alice Meynell's ``Unstable Equilibrium''	13	(18)
Talia Schaffer
Towards a New ``Colored'' Consciousness: Biracial Identity in Pauline Hopkins's Fiction	31	(16)
Leslie W. Lewis
The Authority of Experience: Jane Addams and Hull-House	47	(16)
Francesca Sawaya
``This Other Eden'': Homoeroticism and the Great War in the Early Poetry of H.D. and Radclyffe Hall	63	(18)
Claire Buck
The Heir Unapparent: Opal Whiteley and the Female as Child in America	81	(16)
Deborah Garfield
Part II Outside the Metropolis
In-Between Modernity: Toru Dutt (1856--1877) from a Postcolonial Perspective	97	(14)
Alpana Sharma
New Negro Modernity: Worldliness and Interiority in the Novels of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins	111	(19)
Carla L. Peterson
Olive Schreiner, South Africa, and the Costs of Modernity	130	(16)
Carolyn Burdett
``Tropical Ovaries'': Gynecological Degeneration and Lady Arabella's ``Female Difficulties'' in Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm	146	(18)
Piya Pal-Lapinski
Two Talks with Khun Fa	164	(25)
Lynn Thiesmeyer
Part III The Shifting Terrain of Public Life
``Stage Business'' as Citizenship: Ida B. Wells at the World's Columbian Exposition	189	(16)
James C. Davis
Phenomena in Flux: The Aesthetics and Politics of Traveling in Modernity	205	(16)
Ana Parejo Vadillo
The New Woman's Appetite for ``Riotous Living'': Rebecca West, Modernist Feminism, and the Everyday	221	(16)
Barbara Green
Djuna Barnes Makes a Specialty of Crime: Violence and the Visual in Her Early Journalism	237	(17)
Katherine Biers
In Pursuit of an Erogamic Life: Marie Stopes and the Culture of Married Love	254	(16)
Lucy Burke
Shift Work: Observing Women Observing, 1937--1945	270	(20)
Julian Yates
Afterword	290	(11)
Rita Felski
Notes on Contributors	301	(4)
Index	305