Modernist Literary Collaborations between Women and Men

This book examines literary collaborations between women and men, revealing how deeply imbued and valuable gender conflict was in modernism.

Russell McDonald (Author)

9781316512654, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 October 2022

284 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.583 kg

'… the range of examples that McDonald's book offers, along with the historical and theoretical chapters, … can inspire readers to discover and study other collaborations. The book is also a model for its lucid prose and for how it goes beyond textual matters to critical readings.' Logan Esdale, Textual Cultures

Major figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed 'cross-sex' collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to 'make it new.' Drawing on current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.

Introduction
1. Imagining two as one: collaboration and the discourse of sex relations in early modernism
2. The discord aesthetic in D. H. Lawrence's collaborations with women
3. The fight to be affectionate: textual intimacy and the drive to animate marriage
4. The yolk and white of the one shell: modernism's androgynous textual bodies
5. Being a genius together.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]