Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers (review)

2004 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 487-488
Author(s):  
Gabrielle McIntire
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

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.

“Writing Reform” in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles: The Sonoratown Anthologies

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Anglo American

In early twentieth-century Los Angeles, Anglo-American women writers documented the emergence of a metropolis. Perceptions of race, ethnicity and culture became embedded in the struggle to depict and interpret a new urbanism. In capturing the changing cityscape, women writers constructed Sonoratown, the old Mexican Quarter of Los Angeles, as a place in the social imagination. This article examines representations of Sonoratown and its Mexican inhabitants in two anthologies. Women writers, many of whom moved in civic and reform-minded circles, rendered Sonoratown ambiguously: as a “picturesque” place to be preserved and yet a space earmarked for renewal, Sonoratown became entwined with the drive for social reform, assimilation and urban development.

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.

The Passion Projects

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Micir
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Extensive Body

It's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. This book examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others. The book explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner's carefullly annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes's fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson's collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf's joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field. Arguing for the importance of biography, the book shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.

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