Writing Modernist Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Emily Ridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Dynamic Potential ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
May Sinclair

“Writing Modernist Women: Toward a Poetics of Insubstantiality” traces the development of a “poetics of insubstantiality” across the works of a range of early twentieth-century women writers, including May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Cicely Hamilton, and Edith Wharton, among others. Such a poetics saw a subversive turn towards elements deemed insubstantial, in terms of size and weight, as a means of questioning an established connection of value with the idea of substance. Thus smallness, lightness, and portability are embraced for their dynamic potential in offering an alternative means of engaging with and imagining the world. In demonstrating the dynamic potential of the insubstantial, as conceived by these modernist writers, the chapter builds on recent endeavours, spearheaded by Paul K. Saint-Amour (2018), to conceive of a “weak” modernism, in which “one kind of weakness […] produce[s] another kind of strength.” Likewise, a lack of substance, often even of tangibility, can be found to produce another kind of value in the works I consider here.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Fiona Cox ◽  
Elena Theodorakopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
Vera Brittain ◽  
Claude Cahun

The first half of this introduction provides some context for the variety of women’s responses to the Homeric epics discussed in the volume by tracing the origins of these responses back to earlier authors including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and Claude Cahun. It also discusses the paucity of critical attention paid to women’s receptions of Homer, and demonstrates how much is to be gained by rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey through the work of women writers since the early twentieth century. The second half offers an overview of the approaches and figures selected for discussion, women as diverse as Simone Weil and Kate Tempest, as Francisca Aguirre and Barbara Köhler, working in a variety of genres and radically altering the landscape of classical reception.

The legacy of Lucy Snowe: reconfiguring spinsterhood and the Victorian family in inter-war women’s writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Liggins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Vera Brittain ◽  
May Sinclair ◽  
Three Sisters ◽  
Looking Back

This chapter traces women writers’ reinterpretations and re-workings of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘feminist voice’ between 1910 and 1940, considering political and auto/biographical writing by Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair and Vera Brittain, before focusing on the new spinster heroines of modernist novels such as Sinclair’s The Three Sisters and Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street. These prominent inter-war literary writers are worth (re-)exploring for the ways in which they challenged and reconfigured assumptions about the Victorian family, often through invoking the ‘myth’ of Charlotte Brontë. This post-Victorian mythologising of Charlotte as both dutiful daughter and champion of female singleness was important to feminists, as they traced the genealogies of the woman writer and of women’s political achievements. For women writers from the 1910s to the 1940s, Charlotte Brontë is revered as a figure emblematic of the Victorian daughter’s entrapment within the patriarchal household, and as a pioneering woman writer who created modern, rebellious heroines. Looking back to representations of solitude, independence and singleness in Charlotte’s letters and in her last novel, Villette, modernist authors used their spinster heroines to reject purely domestic identities in order to embrace the world of paid work.

Moonlighting

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ludwig Van Beethoven ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Many

How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poetry and prose resemble Beethoven’s compositions. This book takes a different approach. It focuses on how early twentieth-century writers—chief among them E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf—profited from the representational conventions associated in the nineteenth century and beyond with Beethovenian culture. The emphasis of Moonlighting falls for the most part on how modernist writers made use of Beethovenian legend. It is concerned neither with formal similarities between Beethoven’s music and modernist writing nor with the music of Beethoven per se, but with certain ways of understanding Beethoven’s music which had long before 1900 taken shape as habit, myth, cliché, and fantasy, and with the influence they had on experimental writing up to 1930. Moonlighting suggests that the modernists drew knowingly and creatively on the conventional. It proposes that many of the most experimental works of modernist literature were shaped by a knowing reliance on Beethovenian consensus; in short, that the literary modernists knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it, and that they were eager to profit from it.

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
Life Work ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries seeks to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s writing alongside the work of other women writers during the first decades of the twentieth-century.  This volume not only expands our understanding of an unprecedented number of female writers but also helps us comprehend the ways that these writers contributed to and complicated modernist literature.  It explores how burgeoning communities and enclaves of women writers intersected with and coexisted alongside Virginia Woolf and emphasizes both the development of enclaves and specific female subcultures or individual writers who were contemporaneous with Virginia Woolf.  The essays in the first section, “Who Are Virginia Woolf’s Female Contemporaries,” explore the boundaries of contemporaneity by considering women across nation, time, and class.  The second section, “Cultural Contexts,” explores Woolf’s connections to early twentieth-century culture such as film and book societies. The two final sections, “Recovery and Recuperation,” and “Connections Between Canonical Writers,” illuminate the interlocking network of women writers and artists, the former through women who have been bereft of scholarly attention and the latter through women who have received more scholarly attention.  One of the most enticing sections of the volume is the collection of essays presented during the conference’s Jane Marcus’s memorial. Three of Marcus’s students celebrate the life, work, and influence of this unparalleled Woolf scholar.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

scholarly journals A MODEL OF EXPRESSIONIST STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT IN THE WORK OF THE WRITER (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS OF LEO PERUTS)

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (78) ◽  
pp. 59-63
Author(s):  
E.A. Radaeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Strategy Development ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Large Interval ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
First Time

The purpose of this study is to present a model for the development of the expressionist method in the genre of the novel using the example of the evolution of the novelistic work of the Austrian writer of the early twentieth century L. Perutz. The results obtained: the creative method of the Austrian writer is moving from scientific knowledge to mysticism; in the center of all novels created with a large interval, there is always a confused hero, broken by what is happening (in other words, the absurdity of the world), whose state is often conveyed through gestures; the author finally moves away from linear narration to dividing the plot into almost autonomous stories, thematically gravitating more and more to the distant historical past. Scientific novelty: the novels of L. Perutz are for the first time examined in relative detail through the prism of the aesthetics of expressionism.

scholarly journals Emil Theodor Kocher: an innovator surgeon.

1969 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-234
Author(s):  
María Liliana Franco ◽  
Natalia Acosta ◽  
Lilian Chuaire
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Thyroid Gland ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Emil Theodor Kocher ◽  
Theodor Kocher

Emil Theodor Kocher is considered along with Frank Lahey, Theodor Billroth, William Halsted, Charles Mayo, George Crile and Thomas Dunhill as one of the «Magnificent Seven», referring to the group of surgeons who managed thyroidectomy to make it a safe and efficient intervention that it is now practiced throughout the world. He was author of numerous contributions towards medicine. One of his most important contributions was to elucidate the function of the thyroid gland, through the observation and study of thyroidectomyzed patients, for which he was recognized by the academic and scientific community during the early twentieth century.

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