Threshold Modernism Hardcover

New

Elizabeth F. Evans

Threshold Modernism reveals how changing ideas about gender and race in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain shaped - and were shaped by - London and its literature. Chapters address key sites, especially department stores, women's clubs, and city streets, that coevolved with controversial types of modern women. Interweaving cultural history, narrative theory, close reading, and spatial analysis, Threshold Modernism considers canonical figures such as George Gissing, Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf alongside understudied British and colonial writers including Amy Levy, B. M. Malabari, A. B. C. Merriman-Labor, Duse Mohamed Ali, and Una Marson. Evans argues that these diverse authors employed the 'new public women' and their associated spaces to grapple with widespread cultural change and reflect on the struggle to describe new subjects, experiences, and ways of seeing in appropriately novel ways. For colonial writers of color, those women and spaces provided a means through which to claim their own places in imperial London.

9781108479813

English

Cambridge University Press

06 Mar 2019

280

Elizabeth F. Evans teaches in the Department of English and the Program in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She specializes in British and Anglophone literature of the long twentieth century, with particular attention to modernism. She is the coeditor of Woolf and the City (2010) and has published in Modern Fiction Studies, Literature Compass, and Cultural Analytics and in edited collections on Amy Levy, George Gissing, and Virginia Woolf.