Description
Book SynopsisStylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women's Poetry examines representations of philosophical discourses in Modernist women's writing. Philosophers argued in the early twentieth century for an understanding of the self as both corporeal and relational, shaped and reshaped by interactions within a community. The once clear distinction between self and other was increasingly called into question. This breakdown of boundaries between self and world often manifested in the style of early twentieth-century literary works. Modernist poetry, like stream of consciousness fiction, used metaphor, sound, and a revision of received grammatical structures to blur the boundaries between the individual and collective. This book explores the ways that feminist writers like Mina Loy, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore used style and technique to respond to these philosophical debates, reclaiming agency over a predominantly male philosophical discourse. While many critics have addressed the thematic content of these writers' work, few scholars have taken up this question while focusing on the style of the writing. This book shows how these feminist poets used seemingly small stylistic choices in poetry to make necessary contributions to contemporary philosophical discourses, ultimately rendering these philosophical conversations more inclusive.
Trade ReviewAn incredibly well-researched and eloquent book, showing a forensic eye for poetic nuance with a lush and artful delivery of complex ideas. Kristina Marie Darling never misses.
-- Erica Buist, The Guardian
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Modernism as a Reframing of Individual Conscious Experience
Chapter 1: Reclaiming the Intellectual Agency of Women: Marianne Moore & Jamesian Psychology
Chapter 2: "Each Alone Would Have Left Us To Our Dreams": Avant-Garde Film, Sound Technology, and Montage In H.D.'s Helen In Egypt
Chapter 3: Gertrude Stein: Inhabiting (and Interrogating) the Sentence
Chapter 4: Mina Loy: A Poetics of Rupture and Resistance
Beyond the Self/Other Binary: An Afterward
