Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement

Jody Cardinal is director of the Writing Center at the State University of New York, Old Westbury.Deirdre E. Egan-Ryan is associate professor of English at St. Norbert College.Julia Lisella is associate professor of English at Regis College.

[T]o see a full-length book about American modernist women writers continues to surprise and excite, even in the 21st century. No matter how far women authors have come in English literary studies, an anthology focused on women modernists is a cause for celebration. . . . Editors Jody Cardinal, Deirdre E. Egan-Ryan, and Julia Lisella do an impressive job of contextualizing the sections of their book Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement in an indispensable introduction. . . . To end, I want to return to the editors’ three major objectives for this collection: the recovery of American women writers, the further study of American women writers, and connecting American women’s modernist literature with cultural studies. In light of these goals and of the remarkable and stimulating work they have commissioned to meet them, this reviewer congratulates them on an admirable success.

• ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Modernist Women Writers and American Social EngagementJody Cardinal, Deirdre E. Egan-Ryan, and Julia LisellaPart I: Women’s Work as Modernist Engagement1. Resisting Dismissal: Working-Class Women in the Popular Fiction of Edna Ferber and Mary Roberts RinehartWindy Counsell Petrie2. Virginia Lee Burton’s “Just Sentimental Talk”: Modernist Children’s Literature and Collective ActionDeirdre E. Egan-Ryan3. “In Harmony with the Desert”: Syncretic Modernism in Polingaysi Qoyawayma’s No Turning BackAmanda J. Zink Part II: Modernism, Social Movements, and Advocacy4. Gertrude Stein and College Education for Women: Early Activism and its Modernist LegacyJody Cardinal5. Unclassified: The Political Feminism of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree”Linda Martin6. Anne Spencer’s Epistolary ActivismLesley WheelerPart III: Political Radicals and Modernism 7. Lola Ridge, Modernism, and the Poetics of Radical SentimentalismNathaniel Cadle8. Radical Re-Invention of the Lyric in Genevieve Taggard’s Poems of Hawai‘iJulia Lisella9. Politics, Rhetoric, and Death in Katherine Anne PorterWilliam SolomonPart IV: Modernist Social Engagement in its Global Context10. “Is it time?”: Modernist Experimentation and Harlem Renaissance Prophecy inMarita Bonner’s The Purple FlowerLaura Dawkins11. Economics, Nation, and Family in Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the RoseLinda A. Kinnahan12. Anti-Fascist, Anti-Imperialist, Anti-War: The Political Alter-Egos of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore in 1930s BritainCelena KuschIndexAbout the EditorsAbout the Contributors