Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness

Abstract

Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness explores the aesthetic and political roles performed by Jewish characters in women's fiction between the World Wars. Focusing mainly on British modernism, it argues that female authors enlist a multifaceted vision of Jewishness to help them shape fictions that are thematically daring and formally experimental. Maren Linett analyzes the meanings and motifs that Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dorothy Richardson, and Djuna Barnes associate with Jewishness. The writers' simultaneous identification with and distancing from Jews produced complex portrayals in which Jews serve at times as models for the authors' art, and at times as foils against which their writing is defined. By examining the political and literary power of Semitic discourse for these key women authors, Linett fills a significant gap in the account of the cultural and literary forces that shaped modernism.

Two Paths for Writing by Women in Modernist Studies

“…The widespread interest in transnational and interdisciplinary subjects and approaches, which we have seen in modernist studies broadly, has made its mark on Richardson studies: a blossoming of scholarship especially remarkable in that Pilgrimage has been out of print for decades. Since the late 1990s, a growing interest in the cultural contexts of Richardson’s work has elicited investigations of Pilgrimage ’s portrayal of private and public spaces in the city (McCracken; Bluemel, Experimenting ); use of music (Fahy, Frigerio); and treatment of Judaism (Linett, Rose) and imperialism (Garrity; Bluemel, “Civilization”). Interdisciplinary interests have brought Richardson’s essays under new scrutiny, particularly her writings on cinema for the film journal Close‐Up (Gevirtz, Harvey, Marcus).…”

“The Great Djuna:” Two Decades of Barnes Studies, 1993–2013

“…Early studies of Barnes and race appeared during this time and continue to open up the field in important ways. Critics have problematized the binary logic behind the author's “outcast” figure of the Jew (Hanrahan, Linett, Marcus ), and have reflected on Barnes's own forms of racism (Pinckney). Lara Trubowitz, for example, explores this as a hapless misfiring in Nightwood , which is nonetheless significant.…”