Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference
Transatlantic Culture, 1919–1945

An historical and theoretical analysis of the way gender and race become objects of academic inquiry.

Alice Gambrell (Author)

9780521556880, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 3 July 1997

254 pages, 8 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.33 kg

How do gender and race become objects of intellectual inquiry? What happens to marginal discourses when they participate in the academic processes of scrutiny and evaluation? In Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference, Alice Gambrell examines the careers of a group of women intellectuals - Leonora Carrington, Ella Deloria, H. D., Zora Neale Hurston, and Frida Kahlo - whose scholarly rediscovery coincided with the rise of feminist and minority discourse studies in the academy. She examines the exhibitions, memoirs, poems, ethnographies, and personal correspondences these women produced, combining concrete local observation with contemporary theoretical perspectives on race and gender. Through a mixture of empirical detail and theoretical speculation, Gambrell explores the role these women played in expanding the conception of American literature by their involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. She offers new ways of thinking about the relationships between cultural studies, feminism and minority discourse within the ongoing reassessment of modernism.

Preface
1. Introduction: 'Familiar Strangeness': women intellectuals, modernism, and difference
2. A courtesan's confession: Freda Kahlo and surrealist entrepreneurship
3. Leonora Carrington's self-revisions
4. Hurston among the Boasians
5. Dreaming history: Hurston, Deloria, and insider-outsider dialogue
6. 'Lyrical Interrogation': H. D.'s training-analysis
Conclusion
Broken form.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]