Description

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.

Table of Contents

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

Product details

Published 15 Mar 2019
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 326
ISBN 9781498582902
Imprint Lexington Books
Illustrations 1 b/w illustration
Dimensions 229 x 162 mm
Series Innovation and Activism in American Women's Writing
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Jody Cardinal

Anthology Editor

Deirdre E. Egan-Ryan

Anthology Editor

Julia Lisella

Contributor

Nathaniel Cadle

Contributor

Jody Cardinal

Contributor

Laura Dawkins

Contributor

Celena Kusch

Contributor

Julia Lisella

Contributor

Linda Martin

Contributor

William Solomon

Contributor

Lesley Wheeler

Contributor

Amanda J. Zink

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