We invite submissions for a proposed collection of essays entitled
“Forgotten Feminisms: Popular Women Writers of the 1920s.” In his seminal
work on modernism and mass culture, Andreas Huyssen maintains that,
“Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an
anxiety of contamination by its other…,” an “engulfing” mass culture
gendered as feminine. In the 1920s United States, this “engulfing” mass took
the form of a group of popular women writers, who despite their exclusion
from the category of “literary artist,” produced scores of bestselling
novels while enjoying a potent cultural authority. Bringing together
historical, critical, and biographical perspectives on these writers, this
volume aims to demonstrate that these writers posed their own counterpoint
to masculine modernism. Despite the class, ethnic, and racial differences in
these writers’ personal histories, as a group they participated in and
advanced debates on the most pressing issues of their day. They carved a
spaced between “high” and “low” forms of literary production, contributing
to the rise of a distinctly “middlebrow” culture, as Joan Shelley Rubin has
termed it. While all the authors we will investigate were bestselling
writers, many achieved substantial critical acclaim, as did Edna Ferber,
Zona Gale, and Julia Peterkin; some were powerful editors and “literary
midwives,” like Jessie Fauset and Dorothy Canfield Fisher; and many helped
translate their works into popular films, as did Fannie Hurst, Ferber, and
Olive Higgins Prouty. Despite the immense popularity of these writers, and
their substantive presence on the literary stage of the era, they have
received scanty critical attention. We encourage essays on these writers as
individuals or as a group; on the gendered nature of the literary field; and
on the contributions of women as readers, writers, and consumers to the
cultural moment of the 1920s.
Please send c.v.’s and completed essays by 1/1/2001 to Lisa Botshon,
Humanities Department, University of Maine—Augusta, Augusta ME 04330-9410 or
Meredith Goldsmith, Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech, Mary
Washington College, Fredericksburg VA 22401. Inquiries to botshon@maine.edu
or mgoldsmit@mwc.edu.
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