Gendered modernisms

de Margaret Dickie, Thomas J. Travisano

An American poetic modernism that includes the works of women writers emerges as something far richer than the male-dominated movement whose contours have been so often charted. Gendered, modernism reaches to the political left as well as to the right. Gendered, modernism contends with questions of sexuality, eroticism, and pornography, as well as domesticity and sentimentality. Gendered, modernism can configure issues of race and class from the position of the deracinated and dispossessed. Gendered, modernism becomes sexier, more violent, more personal, more subversive. Gendered Modernisms offers thirteen original essays on Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gwendolyn Brooks, demonstrating how consideration of these women expands the social, textual, and political boundaries of modernism. The collection places these poets in the context of their times, examining the conditions that helped shape their vivid and diverse poetic careers and reconsidering some of the assumptions that have led to their exclusion from the main narratives of modernist poetry. Ultimately, the book's aim is to enlarge the literary history of the movement - for gendered, modernism extends backward to the first years of the century, and forward to the beginnings of postmodernism in the 1960s.