Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English
- Editor: Janine Utell
- Pages: 412
- Published: 2021
- ISBN: 9781603294850 (Hardcover)
- ISBN: 9781603294867 (Paperback)
“The creativity shown here is staggering at times. I am already planning to use some of these innovative approaches to teaching modernism in my own classroom.”
—Lara Vetter, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
As authors and publishers, individuals and collectives, women significantly shaped the modernist movement. While figures such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein have received acclaim, authors from marginalized communities and those who wrote for mass, middlebrow audiences also created experimental and groundbreaking work. The essays in this volume explore formal aspects and thematic concerns of modernism while also challenging rigid notions of what constitutes literary value as well as the idea of a canon with fixed boundaries.
The essays contextualize modernist women’s writing in the material and political concerns of the early twentieth century and in life on the home front during wartime. They consider the original print contexts of the works and propose fresh digital approaches for courses ranging from high school through graduate school. Suggested assignments provide opportunities for students to write creatively and critically, recover forgotten literary works, and engage with their communities.
Acknowledgments (ix)
Introduction (1)
Part I: Reading, Writing, Revising
A Curriculum of Our Own: Teaching Modernist Women’s Literature (13)
Teaching the Revisions of Virginia Woolf and Others (21)
Creating a Critical Edition of Lolly Willowes: Feminist Teaching, Canonicity, and Institutional Labor (33)
Bookish Embodiment: Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing Materially through Print Cultures (45)
Learning Feminist Reading Strategies from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (57)
Guided Creative Writing Imitations as Entry into Modernist Women’s Writing (66)
Part II: Modernist Difficulty
How to Write and Gertrude Stein and How to Read (81)
Embracing Modernist Difficulty with Short Fiction by Women Writers (91)
Assigning Dorothy Richardson’s Difficult Modernist Firsts (102)
Performative Criticism from Virginia Woolf to Shelley Jackson (114)
Part III: Genres
Questioning Modernist Poetry: Feminist Poetics in the Classroom (127)
Playing Stupid: Self-Taught Women and the Modern Diary-Novel (137)
The Woman Born with a Difference: Teaching the Lesbian Novel in a Modernist Context (148)
Adapting Women’s Writing: Melodrama and the Second World War (157)
From Page to Stage: Dramaturgy and the Women’s Voices of the Provincetown Players (166)
Part IV: Places and Races
Teaching American Modernism and Place (177)
Teaching the Harlem Renaissance: Hannah Höch, Marita O. Bonner, and Nella Larsen (188)
Digital Landscapes: Mapping Global Modernist Women Writers (198)
Teaching Jean Rhys and Present-Day African Women’s Fiction (208)
Part V: Modernist Cultures
Teaching Modernism and the Middlebrow Using the Artist-Novel (221)
Refining the “Bozarts”: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Advertising, and the Mainstream Appropriation of Modernism (230)
Dining at the Modernist Table: Teaching Food in Women’s Interwar Writing (241)
Part VI: Radical Women
Introducing New Womanhood and Intersectionality through the Threshold Concept Approach (255)
Teaching Votes for Women and Suffrage Propaganda in the Modernist Classroom (267)
Teaching Modernist Women’s Poems of Protest (277)
Part VII: Digital Humanities
Women Making Modernism: Digital Humanities and Modernist Women’s Innovations (291)
Digital Archives and Women’s War Writing (303)
Recounting the Literary History of Modern Women Writers: Teaching Quantitative Methods to Undergraduates (313)
Theorizing and Teaching Women’s Periodical Networks through Digital Humanities (324)
Activism and Feminist Digital Pedagogy: Virginia Woolf, Muriel Rukeyser, and the Spanish Civil War (337)
Part VIII: Transformational Pedagogy
Modernist Women Writers, Feminist Pedagogy, and the New Modernist Studies Classroom (351)
Teaching Gwendolyn Brooks’s Pedagogical Activism (364)
The Positive Power of Ignorance: Organizing an International Conference on Modernist Women Writers with Undergraduates (375)
Part IX: Resources (385)
Notes on Contributors (395)
