Beschreibung:
Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement explores the role of social and political engagement by women writers in the development of American modernism through an examination of a diverse array of genres by both canonical modernists and underrepresented writers.
Modernist 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 social change.
Contents
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