"A critical narrative of how gender norms and the modernist movement shaped one another in the early 20th century, using vivid case studies"--Provided by publisher.

This book explores the work of three significant American women composers of the twentieth century: Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer and Miriam Gideon. It offers information on both their lives and music and skillfully interweaves history and musical analysis in ways that both the specialist and the more general reader will find compelling. Ellie Hisama suggests that recognising the impact of a composer's identity on the music itself imparts valuable ways of hearing and understanding these works and breaks important new ground towards constructing a feminist music theory.

Gendering Modernism offers a critical reappraisal of the modernist movement, asking how gender norms of the time shaped the rebellion of the self-avowed modernists and examining the impact of radical gender reformers on modernism. Focusing primarily on the connections between North American and European modernists, Maria Bucur explains why it is imperative that we consider the gender angles of modernism as a way to understand the legacies of the movement. She provides an overview of the scholarship on modernism and an analysis of how definitions of modernism have evolved with that scholarship. Interweaving vivid case studies from before the Great War to the interwar period - looking at individual modernists from Ibsen to Picasso, Hannah Höch to Josephine Baker - she covers various fields such as art, literature, theatre and film, whilst also demonstrating how modernism manifested itself in the major social-political and cultural shifts of the 20th century, including feminism, psychology, sexology, eugenics, nudism, anarchism, communism and fascism. This is a fresh and wide-ranging investigation of modernism which expands our definition of the movement, integrating gender analysis and thereby opening up new lines of enquiry. Written in a lively and accessible style, Gendering Modernism is a crucial intervention into the literature which should be read by all students and scholars of the modernist movement as well 20th-century history and gender studies more broadly.

In an exploration of the complex relations between women and the modern, this work challenges conventional male-centred theories of modernity. It examines the gendered meanings of such notions as nostalgia, consumption, feminine writing, the popular sublime, evolution, revolution and perversion.

Focusing on cultural practices, and gender issues during a period of the early 20th-century that witnessed radical transformations in sex roles, this anthology of original (and one classic) essays will generate a greater understanding of women's contributions to modernist culture, and explore how that culture was affected by gender issues. The essays provide a wealth of insights into literature, painting, architecture, design, anthropology, sociology, religion, science, popular culture, music, issues of race and ethnicity, and the influence of 20th-century women and sexual politics.

Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, Dissensuous Modernism shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing. Allyson DeMaagd critiques an overemphasis among modernist writers and generations of researchers on the "masculine" senses of sight and sound, shifting the conversation toward the "feminine" senses of smell, taste, and touch. These senses, long considered "lower," were explored by writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, as DeMaagd demonstrates through detailed close readings of their lesser-studied novels. DeMaagd's analysis shows how these women incorporated technology in their work to reunify the senses or to draw attention to the destructive disunity of the senses, highlighting the subversive potential of sensory integration. Dissensuous Modernism illuminates how modernist women writers breached the sensory borders society erects between men and women, heteronormativity and queerness, ability and disability, technology and nature, and human and nonhuman. It elevates diverse embodied experiences and illuminates the pivotal role of women in modernist sensory thought.

Arguing for a radical re-evaluation of the modernist aesthetic, the essayists consider how women writers created their own version of modernism through the use of sentimental and domestic subject matter, by writing about maternal concerns, and through experiments with plot, voice, and points of view.