Description
Book SynopsisModernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement explores the role of social and political engagement by women writers in the development of American modernism. Examining a diverse array of genres by both canonical modernists and underrepresented writers, this collection uncovers an obscured strain of modernist activism. Each chapter provides a detailed cultural and literary analysis, revealing the ways in which modernists' politically and socially engaged interventions shaped their writing. Considering issues such as working class women's advocacy, educational reform, political radicalism, and the global implications for American literary production, this book examines the complexity of the relationship between creating art and fostering social change. Ultimately, this collection redefines the parameters of modernism while also broadening the conception of social engagement to include both readily acknowledged social movements as well as less recognizable forms of advocacy for s
Trade ReviewModernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement fills in important missing contexts surrounding modernist writing. Although scholars have understood for decades that modernism was not the rarefied, apolitical realm it was sometimes claimed to be, there is still a great deal of work to be done in showing just how modernist writing was politically engaged. In a series of absorbing essays, the authors treat an array of modernist writers, from the canonical to the middlebrow to the little known, bringing to the fore the myriad social and political commitments animating their work. -- Maren Tova Linett, Purdue University
Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement is a welcome addition to the scholarship on gender in modernism/modernity, taking due notice of “middlebrow" writers. The editors and contributors capably relate their work to previous study, expanding on its social concerns, genres, terminology, and the diversity of its canon. The collection contains little-known examples of authors’ activism and encourages comparison of diverse arenas and expressions of social engagement. -- Bonnie Kime Scott, professor emerita, San Diego State University and the University of Delaware
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction: Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement Jody Cardinal, Deirdre E. Egan-Ryan, and Julia Lisella Part I: Women’s Work as Modernist Engagement 1. Resisting Dismissal: Working-Class Women in the Popular Fiction of Edna Ferber and Mary Roberts Rinehart Windy Counsell Petrie 2. Virginia Lee Burton’s “Just Sentimental Talk”: Modernist Children’s Literature and Collective Action Deirdre E. Egan-Ryan 3. “In Harmony with the Desert”: Syncretic Modernism in Polingaysi Qoyawayma’s No Turning Back Amanda J. Zink Part II: Modernism, Social Movements, and Advocacy 4. Gertrude Stein and College Education for Women: Early Activism and its Modernist Legacy Jody Cardinal 5. Unclassified: The Political Feminism of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree” Linda Martin 6. Anne Spencer’s Epistolary Activism Lesley Wheeler Part III: Political Radicals and Modernism 7. Lola Ridge, Modernism, and the Poetics of Radical Sentimentalism Nathaniel Cadle 8. Radical Re-Invention of the Lyric in Genevieve Taggard’s Poems of Hawai‘i Julia Lisella 9. Politics, Rhetoric, and Death in Katherine Anne Porter William Solomon Part IV: Modernist Social Engagement in its Global Context 10. “Is it time?”: Modernist Experimentation and Harlem Renaissance Prophecy inMarita Bonner’s The Purple Flower Laura Dawkins 11. Economics, Nation, and Family in Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose Linda A. Kinnahan 12. Anti-Fascist, Anti-Imperialist, Anti-War: The Political Alter-Egos of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore in 1930s Britain Celena Kusch Index About the Editors About the Contributors
