Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism
Anne E. Fernald
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp. 229-240
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2013.0024
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510579
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WOMEN'S FICTION, NEW
MODERNIST STUDIES, AND
FEMINISM
Anne E. Fernald
This issue presents compelling new work on women writers from
the first half of the twentieth century, but its purpose goes beyond
that. It demonstrates the theoretical energy, historical importance,
and intellectual weight of current feminist work on women writers. In
doing so, it makes the case that no new work on modernism should
go forward without serious engagement with women and feminist
theory. To understand the uneven, surprising, and profound impact
of modernity, we must remember, despite our theoretical, practical,
and somatic sophistication, that gender played and continues to play
an enormous role in defining social roles and economic opportunities.
The historical turn has revitalized modernist studies. Beginning in the late 1990s, its impact continues in new book series from
Oxford and Columbia University Presses; in the Modernist Studies
Association (MSA), whose annual conference has attracted hundreds
of scholars; and in burgeoning digital archives such as the Modernist
Journals Project. Nonetheless, one hallmark of the new modernist
studies has been its lack of serious interest in women writers. Mfs
has consistently published feminist work on and by women writers,
including special issues on Spark, Bowen, Woolf, and Stein; still, this is
the journal's first issue on feminism as such in nineteen years.1 Modernism/modernity, the flagship journal of the new modernism and the
MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 59, number 2, Summer 2013. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
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Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism
MSA, has not, in nineteen years, devoted a special issue to a women
writer or to feminist theory. Only eight essays in that journal have
"feminist" or "feminism" as a key term, while an additional twenty-six
have "women" as a key term. And, although The Oxford Handbook
of Global Modernisms includes many women contributors, only one
of the twenty-eight chapters mentions women in its title, and, of the
six authors mentioned by name, only one—Jean Rhys—is a woman.
It still happens that books claiming to define modernism include only
glancing attention to women writers: witness Gabriel Josipovici's
widely-reviewed What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010).2 While
academics may dismiss Josipovici's book as old-fashioned, reviews in
The Guardian, The Independent, and n+1 gave it mainstream critical
attention accorded to few scholarly books.
In their widely cited essay "The New Modernisms,"3 published in
PMLA's Professions sections, and aspiring to describe the state of the
field as it is and should be, Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz
attest to the energy that has come from expanding modernist studies
vertically, by including low- and middlebrow works; horizontally, by
looking beyond the borders of the United States and United Kingdom;
and temporally, by noting modernism's origins in the late nineteenth
century and, more significantly, its continuation even beyond the
end of World War II. However, gender appears in the essay as one of
many elements in a list of worthy pursuits slightly to the side of what
excites the authors: "questions pertaining to literary form, intraliterary
influence, narratology, affect, gender, sexuality, racial dynamics, psychoanalysis, science, and more continue to propel important scholarly
endeavors, and we might reasonably have chosen other directions
to dwell on here" (737; emphasis added). By compressing gender
into a list of one of the many reasonable pursuits, in an article that
has been cited many times as the field-defining polemic, Mao and
Walkowitz seem to suggest that it is still intellectually acceptable to
conceive of gender as an add-on rather than a defining piece of our
experience of the world. In fact, for over twenty-five years, scholars,
both feminist and non-feminist, have acknowledged gender as a constitutive category of modernism.4 The study of transnationalism and
media have undoubtedly transformed our conception of modernisms,
and yet, if our stated interest is to expand the field to writers whose
work has been heretofore seen as bad or lacking examples of true or
high modernism, if we have an interest in mass culture, if we want to
de-center our gaze so as to encompass all the globe, the first place
we should look is to women readers and writers.
How, then, to proceed in light of the current terrain, in which
work on women writers abounds but definitions of modernist studies
consistently neglect or underserve women? The two prevailing ap-
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proaches harbor significant limitations. New feminist work on women
does not mean, for example, taking the route taken by Katherine
Mullin in her chapter on feminism and modernism in the Cambridge
Companion to Feminist Theory. Mullin uses Woolf's literary writings
as the coatrack on which to hang all women writers, meaning that,
as Mullin herself acknowledges, many women go unmentioned while
familiar greats like Elizabeth Bowen look pale and old-fashioned. And
the longstanding alternative to an approach such as Mullin's involves
writing about modernist women by reviving work on somewhatunderstudied but still fairly familiar writers such as Richardson, Rhys,
Mansfield, and Bowen. In contrast, the essays in this issue shift the
ground, moving to unfamiliar territory, asking us to read without first
measuring every writer against the landmarks we already know. It will
never be enough to simply note that a writer is neglected. Instead,
scholars must show how a forgotten or understudied text helps challenge or advance the field.
Since A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), feminists
have understood the power of the individual woman's story as testimony to the ravages of patriarchy. Be it the story of an abused wife,
a mistreated governess, an education denied, a forced marriage,
a rape, an unwanted child, a wanted child whose life also ends a
loved career; be it the story of boredom, of insanity, of repression,
or of poverty, the archive of women's stories across the globe is an
archive of how material circumstances collide with dreams. One of
the most salient advantages of the historical turn has been renewed
critical energy around the archive. In modernist studies, this has also
meant training our attention on other parts of the globe beyond the
Anglo-American axis. Partly in response to this historicist and archival
turn, and partly as an outgrowth of psychoanalytic and trauma studies, affect theory has emerged alongside both of these movements
as a tool to analyze feelings as they operate in society. The archive,
affect, and globalism are among three of the most powerful theoretical
tools in modernist studies today. None of these terms is sustainable
without feminist theory; each of these terms is enriched by attentiveness to the difference gender makes. Affect theory, growing out of
and operating within a feminist and queer discourse, knows this; the
archive and globalism always stand in danger of forgetting. Each of
the essays in this special issue understands the revolutionary tradition of feminism and its relation to paternal structures of authority.
This collection of essays by women scholars, using feminist
theory to analyze the female characters in literary and cinematic texts
by women authors and directors bears a family resemblance to those
volumes of collective biographies of worthy women that clutter our
library shelves and were once a standard prize for girls of academic
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Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism
achievement. Alison Booth's How to Make It as a Woman documents
the abundant, almost subliterary genre of collective biographies of
women. While Booth focuses on the long nineteenth century, such
books are still with us; we still use the stories of women's lives and
achievements pedagogically, showing young women how to be. The
recent book for young readers, Girls Who Rocked the World, includes
lives of Joan of Arc and Sacagawea, both of whom were frequent
subjects in Victorian collections. But it also starts with an epigraph
from pioneer feminist historian Gerda Lerner and includes Rigoberta
Menchu and Maya Lin. "Rocked" in the title refers to music, not cradles,
as the cover's jolly cartoon illustration of Joan of Arc, Sacagawea, Frida
Kahlo, and Mother Theresa with bass, guitar, mic, and drum, makes
clear. Like Girls Who Rocked the World, this special issue employs a
principle of variety to present modern women. However, these articles are not biographies, and this is not only a project of recovery.
In fact, as the continuing proliferation of such collective biographies might suggest, there can be something self-deluding about
recovery projects. As Lisa Cohen notes in the introduction to All We
Know: Three Lives, none of the three early twentieth-century women
whose lives she presents felt herself in need of being recovered. Cohen's book derives its power from her demonstration how central her
subjects were to the modern zeitgeist, teaching us at once to see the
invisible lesbian, and to know that, in each of these women's milieux,
she was not invisible at all. Gerda Lerner and others have observed
that our amnesia about the achievements of women in prior generations derives from patriarchy's erasure of women from history with
a capital H (Booth 20). Thus, celebrations of women can stand as a
kind of compensatory history. Just as patriarchy continually constructs
history with men at its center, so, too, by omission, history ends up
making women notice their own lack of representation, and, in so
doing, runs the risk of reinscribing patriarchal power.
However, articles applying feminist theory to unfamiliar texts
have the potential to teach us new ways of reading, and to introduce
new texts, both literary and theoretical, into our classrooms. Indeed,
contemporary theoretical trends seem particularly promising for the
study of women writers, for advancing our thinking beyond recovery
for its own sake. Feminist work on women writers has long been
archival, from A Room of One's Own, to The Madwoman in the Attic
(1979) and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1984). The historical
turn in modernism brings new energy to the archive: The Modernist
Journals Project makes possible all kinds of projects that would have
been difficult to imagine or undertake before the careful curation and
digitalization of dozens of little magazines.5 In the loosest sense of
the term, every article here is archival, but Urmila Seshagiri's and
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Aimee Wilson's contributions demonstrate the power and potential
of intense and thorough work in an archive. Seshagiri's piece studies the publisher Persephone Books (founded 1999) as an institution
of modernism operating in our day. Her piece at once embodies a
methodology for analysis of a single publishing enterprise and suggests many further avenues for study, be they readings of Persephone
titles (as Andrea Adolph does in her piece for this issue), histories of
other feminist institutions of modernism, or work on textiles. Wilson
takes a more granular approach, offering a close reading of how the
contributors to Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review transformed
the gothic to comment on the horrors of poverty and unwanted pregnancy. Wilson's piece—powerful, witty, and timely on its own—offers
a model for scholars seeking to contextualize magazine fiction in
relation to social issues, censorship law, and genre.
The move to global modernism has benefited Jean Rhys's reputation, which has been rising for years. Anne Cunningham's article on
Voyage in the Dark show us afresh the complexity of the heroine's
impossible wish to transgress racial boundaries. Jessica Berman's
recent work on Indian women writers reminds us that, when exploring modernism outside the Anglo-American context, we must keep
gender in mind; accounts of the history of the Indian novel in English
can no longer stop with Anand, Rao, and Narayan, but must include
Cornelia Sorabji, Iqbalunnisa Hussain, and G. Ishvani. To that list,
we can now add Zeenuth Futehally. As Ambreen Hai's analysis of
Zohra shows, Futehally worked within and challenged the bounds of
purdah and the ways in which Indian nationalism situated tradition
in the domestic sphere. Finally, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein shows the
feminist inflections of the global in her article on Muriel Rukeyser's
Savage Coast, a novel of the Spanish Civil War that was roundly rejected in 1936, likely, as Kennedy-Epstein shows, because publishers
could not understand how to read its radical woman protagonist and
Rukeyser's equally radical formal experimentation. What was impossible to understand in the 1930s becomes a thrilling document for us
today, and Kennedy-Epstein shows us the true internationalism of the
Republican side from a woman's perspective, while reminding us of the
sorry misogyny of a publishing world that has kept Savage Coast from
print until 2013, with an edition edited by Kennedy-Epstein herself.
In affect theory, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Halberstam all have recent books exposing the construction of happiness, uncovering the ways in which our culture defines happiness in
consistently heteronormative, capitalist, and bourgeois terms. In this
issue, both Cunningham and Adolph engage with affect theory to show
how Rhys and Laski stage a feminist critique by setting in motion a
protagonist who is, in Rhys's case, thwarted in the search for conventional happiness, and, in Laski's, fulfilled by rejecting convention.
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Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism
One of my goals for this issue has been to refresh our sense of
the variety of women's responses to modernity. After all, women in
the first half of the twentieth century lived through the most rapid
and significant expansion of their social roles in history. To take one
example: most of the authors studied here were born without the
right to vote; whether that right was obtained in childhood, youth,
or adulthood, knowing how very recently one was not considered
a fully-fledged citizen (if one is yet) must affect how one imagines
oneself in the world. These social changes make such an exciting story that it is tempting to make it part of a false narrative of
progress: the vote, the professions, property, education, choice to
marry and choice of a mate, increasing acceptance of lesbianism and
queer sexualities. Nonetheless, although progress was made in the
period, each of these essays documents the uneven and unpredictable effects of modernity on individuals. Where Persephone Books
reprints novels that remind us of the pressure many women felt to
position themselves as guardians of the familial and domestic, Rhys's
protagonist rejects what her character sees as the "drug" (104) of
family admiration while Laski's protagonist's blitz-time appetite for
furs, champagne, and casual sex highlights the bleak scarcity of the
mend-and-make-do culture of the time.
Some of these pieces, such as those on Dorothy Arzner and
Marghanita Laski, celebrate new possibilities for women. Others, such
as those on the Birth Control Review stories or Rhys, participate in
what Judith Halberstam calls "shadow feminism," an anti-Oedipal
project, founded in negation and silence (124). For many of these
women autonomy is a problem. In Olive Moore's Spleen the protagonist's theories of creativity are challenged when she gives birth to a
severely disabled son; in the gothic stories of Vorse and Wellman,
women's bodies take on lives of their own, trapping women in an
unending cycle of pregnancy and increasing poverty; in the novels
of Rukeyser and Futehally, the young protagonists speak with what
Susan Howe might call a "stutter" (181), backing away from their
own most intense feelings, and struggling to figure out what political
participation—for Spain or a decolonized India—might look like for a
woman. In fact, as the articles collected here demonstrate, the most
exciting theoretical conversations within modernist studies today gain
strength from what Sianne Ngai calls "a feminist attentiveness to the
persistence of sexual hierarchies" (2).
The eight articles in this issue contain substantive discussion
of ten modernist women writers (including one film director). These
writers range from the well known—Jean Rhys is the most canonical—and the recently recovered—Constance Maud, Cecily Hamilton,
Olive Moore, Zeenuth Futehally, Dorothy Arzner, Marghanita Laski,
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Muriel Rukeyser—to the entirely forgotten—Mary Heaton Vorse and
Rita Wellman. One of the great innovations in the new modernisms
has been Bourdieuian attention to institutions of modernism, and
at least two of the essays in this issue address that. One looks at
the cultural interdependence between the short stories in Margaret
Sanger's Birth Control Review (including a discussion of their heavy
reliance on gothic tropes) and Sanger's politics. Another studies the
contemporary British publisher Persephone Books as a new institution
of modernism. In addition to Seshagiri's piece, the issue includes articles on four reprinted novels: Persephone's 2009 printing of Laski's
To Bed with Grand Music (pseudonymously published in 1946) about
a woman living large during the blitz; Oxford University Press's 2004
reprint of Zeenuth Futehally's 1951 novel, Zohra, the first Indian
novel in English by a Muslim woman; Dalkey Archive Press's 1996
reprint of Olive Moore's Spleen (1930); and the Feminist Press' 2013
first-ever printing of Muriel Rukeyser's Spanish Civil War novel Savage Coast. If, in Woolf's words, "money dignifies what is frivolous if
unpaid for" (64), print dignifies what is uncanonical if only available
as a poorly-scanned PDF, so I am particularly hopeful that scholarly
attention to these texts will help keep them in print and encourage
the conversation around them to grow.
Seshagiri's "Making it New: Persephone Books and the Modernist
Project" offers a thick description of a twenty-first century institution
of modernism. Seshagiri analyzes books on Persephone's list, their
authors and original publishers, and discusses the insights they bring
to both feminist activism (especially suffrage) and feminist expertise
in the domestic (including cooking and textiles). She also offers an
account of the founder, Nicola Beauman's, complex and not always
easy relationship to academic feminism, which has mostly ignored
her work. Continuing the work of Bonnie Kime Scott and others,
Seshagiri traces a network of relationships among authors and publishers, arguing that we refine our sense of recovery to encompass
restoration (looking at work that has fallen almost entirely from
view), reorientation (examining work that expands and shifts the
reputation of authors, reminding us of the range of a writer's career
or the continuing power of what was once popular), and elaboration
(adding to our knowledge of writers who are not entirely forgotten
such as Margaret Oliphant and Katherine Mansfield). As Seshagiri
demonstrates, the press exemplifies and makes possible the interconnected work of modernist recovery.
Jane Garrity's essay, "Olive Moore's Headless Woman," introduces scholars to Moore's novel, Spleen, a linguistically dense and
highly allusive modernist text published in London by a feminist writer
active in the literary field. Garrity explores Moore's critique of es-
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Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism
sentialism and notions of feminine writing, including her disavowal of
embodiment. What makes Spleen particularly interesting, as Garrity
shows, is how Moore tests her own critique through her protagonist's
pregnancy and the subsequent birth of a severely disabled son. Pregnancy has a particularly dangerous relation to creativity because it
is an act of creation that is wholly embodied, confined to women,
and outside of intellectual control. As Moore explores, the desire to
create something new is not always fulfilled by maternity. In fact,
Ruth, one of Spleen's protagonists, chiefly responds to pregnancy
and motherhood by displacing her pregnancy from body to mind, as if
she is Zeus, and her son, an Athena-to-be. When Ruth's son Richard
proves special not in his divinity but in his disability, all of Ruth's—and
many of Moore's—ideas about embodiment, gender, and creativity
face a serious challenge. Garrity's piece helps us begin to unravel a
novel that deserves a much wider audience, one at once limited by
its own historical moment, and yet full of ideas to challenge our own
theoretical orthodoxies.
Ambreen Hai's reading of Zeenuth Futehally's important but
almost entirely overlooked novel, Zohra, demonstrates how precise
our global gaze must be to understand the impact of modernity. In
"Adultery Behind Purdah and the Politics of Indian Muslim Nationalism in Zeenuth Futehally's Zohra," Hai presents the first study ever
of Zohra, the first Indian novel published in English by a Muslim
woman. As Hai shows, the faint praise of E. M. Forster's Foreword
back in 1951 offered little indication of the radical thematic explorations within this conventionally plotted novel about the adulterous
desires of two virtuous people. Hai's twinned argument encompasses
both Futehally's daring and creative innovations on the form of the
English novel to make room for a plot involving a woman in an arranged marriage and her efforts to keep alive the idea of Muslim
Indians at the moment of partition. Hai shows how patriarchal social
conventions straitened the lives of moneyed Indian women in ways
that resonate with but differ from the ways in which Anglo-American
women's lives were straitened. The spirited Zohra, in an acceptable
but dull arranged marriage, experiences her first chance to meet
men in her husband's home, and she falls in love with her progressive brother-in-law; he, in turn, ignites her desire to learn and be
useful by getting her interested in Gandhi's work for independence
and on behalf of the poor. In the spirit of Persephone Books, Hai's
article demonstrates how the ordinary domestic concerns of modern
women reveal challenges at the heart of our political and social lives.
Sara Bryant's "Dorothy Arzner's Talkies: Gender, Technologies of
Voice, and the Modernist Sensorium" focuses on Hollywood director
Dorothy Arzner's career, most especially on her sound film Anybody's
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Woman (1930). Contrasting Arzner's embrace of sound technology
with the hesitation regarding sound expressed by feminist film theorists at the time (H. D. and Dorothy Richardson) and more recently
(Kaja Silverman), Bryant restages a controversy of early film theory
as a conflict among feminists about the gender of technology. In close
readings of key scenes, Bryant demonstrates Arzner's feminist and
cinematic innovations, in shot selection, in individual performances,
in sequences (such as the fans or the waxworks), and puts those
scenes in the context of a studio system that had little room for extended avant-garde direction.
If Arzner was concerned with finding practical ways to make a
success, Jean Rhys exemplifies failure to an exasperating, operatic
degree. Anne Cunningham's "'Get on or get out': Failure and Negative
Femininity in Jean Rhys' Voyage in the Dark" is attentive to the complexities of Rhys' appropriation of Creole identity and its participation
in the growing theoretical conversation in affect theory and happiness
studies. Using Halberstam's notion of shadow feminism and Ngai's
noncathartic emotions, Cunningham argues that Rhys exposes the
need for an alternate model of white female respectability through
her narratives of failure. The notion of self-destruction as protest
is particularly resonant in this moment after the Great Recession.
Furthermore, Cunningham treats the question of race in the novel,
especially Anna's desire to be black, with great intelligence and sophistication. Like Futehally's protagonist, Rhys's Anna meditates on
the ways that race and class status straiten women's choices, showing the pernicious contrast between the considerable rise in social
opportunities and the lag in opportunities for financial independence.
As the archive has expanded into culture, food studies has
emerged as a distinct subset of cultural studies thanks to the work
of Andrea Adolph and Nicola Humble. Food bears our attention as an
economic good and a marker of class and culture that is connected
to women (and thus ripe for feminist analysis). Unique among consumer goods, we incorporate food into our bodies and transform it
into energy and waste. Rationing during both World Wars severely
limited food's availability in Britain and often novels bear clues about
characters—the virtuous war wife opening a can of beans, or the
brazen hussy dining on oysters—that would have been much more
striking at the time. Food studies reveals cultural clues that might
otherwise be lost to history. In Adolph's contribution here, "'At least
I get my dinners free': Transgressive Dining in Marghanita Laski's To
Bed with Grand Music," Adolph combines her acuity in reading food
clues with affect theory. In doing so, she draws clear and compelling
connections between constructions of female sexuality during World
War II and Laski's depictions of woman's desire. Amid the rationing
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Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism
and asceticism on the Home Front, Laski's protagonist emerges as a
transgressive figure whose dining habits frame her sexual encounters.
As such, she stands as a figure of fantasy and, perhaps, scorn for
those postwar women readers still virtuously dining on food in tins.
In "'Her symbol was civil war': Recovering Muriel Rukeyser's Lost
Spanish Civil War Novel" Rowena Kennedy-Epstein recontextualizes
the leftist poet Muriel Rukeyser's career in light of her early novel,
Savage Coast. This autobiographical bildungsroman was written when
Rukeyser, then 22, had just won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and had
already served time in jail for fraternizing with African Americans.
Rukeyser arrived in Europe, and went to Spain to witness the outbreak
of Civil War. Kennedy-Epstein shows how Rukeyser's decision to reject
the binary of political versus apolitical modernism in her narrative
ironically results in the marginalizing (the near-disappearance, in fact)
of her text, and how her publishers discouraged her from the hybrid,
complex, radical, sexual, and politically engaged novel in favor of more
personal poems. Lest we think that critical response to a text might
be gender-neutral, Kennedy-Epstein cites those who condemned her
formal shifts as literary promiscuity, hardly a charge leveled against
The Waste Land. Savage Coast predates our best-known accounts
of the war, and Kennedy-Epstein analyzes it in light of other recent
discoveries of women's involvement in that conflict—especially of the
central role of photographer Gerda Taro. Kennedy-Epstein demonstrates how Rukeyser's poetics of history pays special attention to
the past within the present. As our present now includes this novel,
our view of women's role in the war, and of Rukeyser is the richer
thanks to Kennedy-Epstein's meticulous work as scholar and editor
of the 2013 printing of this forgotten text.
Aimee Wilson's "Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger"
analyzes the fiction that appeared in the Birth Control Review, focusing
on its reappropriation of the gothic. In the stories Wilson discusses
here, gothic tropes reveal the body's will to reproduce, regardless of
a woman's interest in becoming a mother (again). Wilson observes
that, in contrast to male modernism, these conception narratives
depict autonomy as a form of horror rather than a goal, a distinction
which bears comparison with Olive Moore's explorations of a related
topic and has potentially far-reaching implications for other studies
of modernism, gender, and the self. Wilson also shows how, under
constant threat of censorship, Sanger used fiction as a cover through
which to distribute her political tracts.
Although special issues often group their contributions into
clusters, this stunning collection presented no easy sets. Instead, as
this introduction has strived to show, each article participates in a
larger conversation about women, feminist theory, and new modernist
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studies, and anyone who reads the volume through will find many
pairs, trios, resonances, and echoes.
Notes
From conceiving of the issue through the final edits, this process has
been leavened by the help of many. I would especially like to thank
John Duvall and Robert Marzec at Mfs; the contributors; Jay Dickson,
Shonni Enelow, and Urmila Seshagiri who read earlier versions of this
introduction; and my colleagues at Fordham University, especially
Sarah Cornish, Peter Murray, Kate Nash, Christy Pottroff, and Phil
Sicker. Each of them has reminded me of the power of collaboration,
and I am grateful.
1.
Judith Roof edited a double-issue on sexuality and narrative for the
Fall/Winter 1995 issue of Mfs.
2.
For a discussion of Woolf's exceptional position in modernist studies,
see Randall. For more on how women are frequently underrepresented
in accounts of modernism, see Seshagiri in this volume.
3.
See, for example, Herring 4, Friedman 473, Winkiel 38, and Wollaeger
10.
4.
See especially Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide (1987),
which describes a gendered hierarchy of high-male and low-female
and subsequent feminist responses such as Rita Felski's The Gender
of Modernity (1995). Both studies emphasize the centrality of questions of gender, sexuality, and the role of women to the challenges
of modernism and modernity.
5.
For more on the possibilities of periodical studies for feminism, see
Green.
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