Revisiting the Poetics and Politics of Modernism

This book revisits women’s literature in 1922, long hailed as the miracle year of literary modernism, a landmark year of avant-garde innovations in publications that included James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Yet if 1922 has been considered a modernist annus mirabilis, it was many things besides. In “1922 or thereabouts,” according to Willa Cather, the literary “world broke in two,” sequestering traditional writers from those considered modern. Many women writers produced work that year across a spectrum of genres, forms, and politics that would not be accepted into Hugh Kenner’s modernist canon. Nor, however, did they readily fit into Cather’s categories, in some cases rupturing, and in other cases affirming a consensus of modernism as a masculinist, culturally imperialist interwar enterprise. Considering 1922’s historical significance, the essays in this collection seek greater inclusion of women in our memory of this year, including writers from a range of global and regional contexts and cultural backgrounds. Extending other attempts to examine the gender politics of modernism/modernity over the past thirty years, the project draws connections between the significance of 1922, as it has been understood in the new modernist studies, and feminist literary criticism that utilizes single-year approaches, to revisit and reflect on women’s history and the gender politics of modernism.