Christoph Ehland - Böcker

Assessing the cultural history of the dandy as a figure traditionally gendered masculine, this wide-ranging study advances a critical space for the discussion of the woman dandy. Modernist Women Dandies revisits dandyism to provide an interpretative framework for re-evaluating the literary careers of women authors with atypical literary presence: Edith Sitwell, Nancy Cunard, and Mina Loy. Cutting across media boundaries, it demonstrates how their experimental poetry and portrait photographs feed into each other, fabricating dandy authorial performances that are simultaneously unapologetically feminine and queer. In showing how these authors redefined the interplay between dandyism and authorship, this book makes an important contribution to rethinking modernist literary culture.

Scholars of the middlebrow have demonstrated that the preferences and choices of both women writers and women readers have suffered considerably from the dismissive attitude of earlier critics. George Eliot’s famous attack on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ set the tone for the long tradition of gendered disputes over the literary merit of works of fiction – a controversy which eventually coalesced with a class-based hegemony of taste in the so-called Battle of the Brows.The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the wider dissemination of new concepts of gender. By exploring the scope of middlebrow media culture between 1890 and 1945, from household magazines to popular novels, the essays in this volume give evidence of the relative proximity that existed between middlebrow writers and the avant-garde in their concern for gender issues.Contributors: Nicola Bishop, Elke D’hoker, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Stephanie Eggermont, Christoph Ehland, Wendy Gan, Emma Grundy Haigh, Kate Macdonald, Louise McDonald, Tara MacDonald, Isobel Maddison, Ann Rea, Cornelia Wächter, Alice Wood

The essays collected in this volume unfold a panorama of urban phenomena of resistance that reach from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, thus revealing the essential vulnerability of urban space to all forms of subversion. Taking their readers to diverse places and moments in history, the contributions remind us of the struggles over the concrete as well as the imaginary space we call the city. The collection maps the various challenges experienced by urban communities, ranging from the unmistakably hegemonic claim of civic festivities in early modern London to the perceived threat posed by newly created parks in the Restoration period and from the dangers of criminality and riots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the transformation of the Berlin Wall into souvenirs scattered around the globe.Contributors: Ingo Berensmeyer, Christoph Ehland, Pascal Fischer, Blake Fitzpatrick, Kerstin Frank, Jens Martin Gurr, Bernd Hirsch, Marie Hologa, Mihaela Irimia, Stephan Kohl, Norbert Lennartz, Catharina Löffler, Margaret Olin, István Rácz, Gerd Stratmann.