{"title":"About Our Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241725","url":null,"abstract":"Published in Women: a cultural review (Vol. 34, No. 3, 2023)","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138529627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword: Women’s Writing and Feminist Archival Activism","authors":"Catherine Clay","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241749","url":null,"abstract":"Published in Women: a cultural review (Vol. 34, No. 3, 2023)","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138529629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anti-Communism and the Culture of Celebrity: Rebecca West Mediates the Meanings of Treason","authors":"Debra Rae Cohen","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241735","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the preface to her 1956 revised edition of The Meaning of Treason, Rebecca West lays out the rationale for the newly reframed volume—already the third distinct version of that work to be published in the UK since the first American publication by Viking in 1947. This preface enacts the process to which I will point in this essay—the way that anticommunist activism takes on an increasing formal dimension in West’s writing, altering the balance one sees in her earlier work between the recognition of incompatible narratives and the desire to impose historical meaning. This particular formal shift plays itself out in relation to the mechanics of reputation, the counternarrative, and the media smear, a constellation of journalistic devices to which West, herself a lifelong journalist, became in this period highly sensitized. The stridency of West’s anticommunism increased during the mid-1950s along with her sensitivity to the manipulation of reputation—including her own. Always alert for slights and protective of her public image, West found herself during these years repeatedly the subject of ‘mendacious misrepresentation’ both in response to her anticommunist journalism and, simultaneously, in the ‘clotted spite’ of her son Anthony’s autobiographical novel—campaigns that, it was suggested, might actually be related. West’s appropriative reframing of the media in the successive editions of The Meaning of Treason signals the extent to which the mechanisms of modernist celebrity helped determine, in the 1950s, both the representation of communist ‘disinformation’ and the formal response to it—offering an important precursor to the preemptive anti-media rhetoric of today’s political landscape.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"28 1","pages":"221 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81094801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remembering the Suffragette for Interwar Feminism: Vera Brittain’s Honourable Estate","authors":"Barbara Green","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241726","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241726","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article is concerned with Vera Brittain’s 1936 feminist historical novel, Honourable Estate, focusing on the novel’s efforts to represent a feminist past as it contemplates its present moment of ‘transition’. Brittain meets the difficult task of making sense of the present moment by juxtaposing two backward-looking literary forms—the feminist historical novel and the diary—which suggest two very different attitudes to temporality. The layering of these forms in Honorable Estate allows for a nuanced treatment of the new challenges and opportunities of the interwar period for modern women and creates a space for ambivalence.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"73 1 1","pages":"187 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77258022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Writers and Their Workshops","authors":"Lee Bangerter","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241756","url":null,"abstract":"In Literary Rebels, Lise Jaillant puts forward a trans-Atlantic study of the cultural history of creative writing programmes. This slim volume introduces material drawn from considerable archival research and oral history interviews to show how the current creative writing landscape came to be, from the ongoing tensions between creative writers and literary scholars in many university English departments to the writing course options available outside of university settings. While not a specific focus of study, Jaillant points out ways in which women and writers of colour remained on the margins of academic creative writing programmes throughout much of the twentieth century. She frames much of the book around three broad creative writing models: informal mentorship; academic programmes focused on writing workshops and professionalization; and a third model she calls ‘radical individualism’ (230), which values creative freedom over the income stability of academic employment. Divided into two sections, the book first examines the development of creative writing programmes in America before focusing attention on Britain. Chapter one investigates ways that regionalism and internationalism shaped Paul Engle’s vision for teaching creative writing and his continued influence at the University of Iowa in both theWriters’Workshop and the International Writing Program. The second chapter follows a trail of letters in the archives to uncover a tale of the unsuccessful overtures of an aspiring writer to secure William Faulkner’s support as a mentor. The next chapter explores Wallace Stegner’s influence at Stanford University’s writing programme and how his time there reveals both the chasm between creative and academic departments and the growing tension between the faculty and a more politically radical student body starting in the 1960s. In the last two chapters of this section, Jaillant looks beyond academia to consider ways that organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Famous Writers School contributed to the proliferation of creative Lise Jaillant, A History of Creative Writers in AngloAmerican Universities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 288 pp., £30 hardback, ISBN: 9780192855305","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"20 1","pages":"252 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78872828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Silent Fanfare","authors":"Catherine A. Kelly","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241752","url":null,"abstract":"The affect of this kind of cinematic experience, Russo suggests, is a kind of uncanny longing, ‘a nostalgia for something that they’ve never seen before: themselves on the screen’. What Russo describes as a moment of inchoate queer identification in the cinema’s darkened rooms, Diana W Anselmo terms ‘spectatorial voltage’, the ‘electricity’ that ‘impels fans to retrieve special meaning from a picture, a gesture, a plot, a performance’ (16). It is this ‘voltage’, experienced by North American ‘girl fans’ of the 1910s, that Anselmo seeks to recover and analyse in A Queer Way of Feeling. Like Russo’s imagined queer adolescent, these fans – largely women in their teens and early twenties – found refuge in popular media which seemed, in an oblique way, to have ‘something to do with [their] live[s]’ – with their homoerotic fantasies, their dreams of unconventional lifepaths and their ambivalently gendered narratives of self. Documenting a transitional moment in which medical and criminal discourses of female gendered and sexual deviance gained prominence in the public imagination, Anselmo provides a dual history of the emergence of the Hollywood star system and of an overlooked aspect of early twentieth-century queer media reception. Since Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (1981), a robust scholarship has grown up around the queer subtextual lining of twentieth-century cinema. Anselmo’s intervention is to read not the films themselves, but the fan ephemera that grew up around the stars of the silent screen, analysing the letters, scrapbooks and diaries of the young women and girls across the US who Diana W Anselmo, A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood, Oakland: University of California Press, 2023, 280 pp., £71 hardback, £25 paperback, ISBN: 9780520299658","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"43 1","pages":"248 - 251"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87428635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Excavating Theatre History: Text, Performance and Biographies","authors":"Ciara O’Dowd","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241751","url":null,"abstract":"James Pethica is a name famous in the scholarship of Irish theatre; his work has long been deemed crucial to an understanding of the Irish Literary Revival and the establishment of the Abbey Theatre as the country’s National Theatre. In 1988, Pethica wrote a landmark essay which asserted that Lady Augusta Gregory was, in fact, a co-author of Yeats’ seminal play Cathleen Ní Houlihan. He marshalled archival and other evidence to argue that Gregory was not simply a patron, but her ideas and writing were fundamental contributions to the form and content of the text. In chapter two of this fascinating volume, Brewer Redwine notes that Pethica’s argument was not a new discovery; the same substantiated argument had been made by Elizabeth Coxhead in 1962 (21). Yet, Pethica is consistently credited with this revelation. Subtly and without a glimmer of disrespect, Brewer Redwine picks apart the accepted history to reinsert the important work of a female scholar into the narrative of academic scholarship. This is, one comes to realize on reading her book, a characteristic move; it is one the author carries out with elegance at regular intervals. She diligently excavates Irish theatre history to reveal vital truths that have always been there, but never acknowledged as meaningful. While the facts and clues have been available, it is in the assiduous, inherently feminist work of picking apart the presented story and piecing the facts back together, while also laying bare this excavation process, that she presents a compelling counter-narrative of authorship at the Abbey Theatre. There is a wealth of scholarship on the social history of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre and how issues of class and political nationalism sparked the crucible from which the theatre emerged (Pilkington; Morash; Grene). Elizabeth Brewer Redwine, Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021, HB £60, 240 pages, ISBN: 9780192896346","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"61 1","pages":"244 - 247"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74733613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Unlikely Couple","authors":"G. Gerzina","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241727","url":null,"abstract":"Susan Sellers’ latest novel, Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story, depicts a clash of cultures between the members of the Bloomsbury Group and the acclaimed Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova. In Sellers’s telling, the unlikely and surprising relationship between economist and Bloomsbury insider Maynard Keynes and outsider Lopokova posed a nearly existential threat to the group’s cohesiveness and carefully crafted way of life, which was based on certain shared points of view about the arts, intellect and conversation. Into their lives and homes danced a chatty Russian interloper who read Shakespeare to improve her imperfect but voluble English, ignored their hints about her intrusions into their silent work, and unexpectedly beguiled a man whom they had long claimed as one of their own. Having previously written the well-received novel Vanessa and Virginia, about sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Sellers is no stranger to biofiction. Already recognized as a scholar and editor of Virginia Woolf’s work, and translator of French writer and thinker Hélène Cixous, she also is a professor of creative writing. Her research, outlined in the novel’s ‘Acknowledgements’, is extensive, ranging from imperial Russia and ballet to Keynesian economics. She also relies—in a good way—on Judith Mackrell’s 2011 biography of Lopokova, Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes. It is this double description of Lopokova that leads Sellers to delve into the inner life of a woman who was a superb performer and unimagined wife. We know her as a Bloomsbury disrupter, but what was it like to be Lydia? In many ways, fiction may be the best vehicle for answering this question. Much has been written about vision and reality by Bloomsbury, in works like Roger Fry’s book Vision and Design or Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, but as Michael Lackey points out, ‘using fiction to access and represent a reality, such as a person’s interiority or the essence of a group, is much different from fictionalizing a person or a group’. In this novel, Sellers offers both Lopokova’s interiority and the essence of a group. Susan Sellers, Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story, Edward Everett Root, London, 2022, £19.69, 230 pp., ISBN: 9781913087807","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"30 1","pages":"241 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78245443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introducing Lilo Linke and Hilary Newitt: Storm Jameson’s Anti-Fascist Collaborations in the 1930s","authors":"Jake O’leary","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241730","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines Storm Jameson’s literary collaborations with other women writers in the 1930s, reading them as a mode of anti-fascist activism. Jameson collaborated with Lilo Linke on her 1934 memoir-travelogue, Tale Without End, and with Hilary Newitt on her 1937 sociological study, Women Must Choose, providing editorial assistance, access to publication and introductions to both texts. Through readings of Jameson’s introductions in relation to the texts they precede, I argue that Jameson promoted Linke’s and Newitt’s work to alert British women readers to the threat fascism posed to their freedom and persuade those readers to oppose it. I aim to locate these collaborations in the context of women’s anti-fascist activism from which they arose, while drawing attention to feminist literary exchanges that remain underexplored.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"74 1","pages":"204 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76942049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women Writers, Generic Form, and Social and Political Activism","authors":"Lise Shapiro Sanders, Carey J. Snyder","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2241719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241719","url":null,"abstract":"The early twentieth century abounded with movements that reshaped women’s lives—including those for women’s suffrage, peace, birth control, and better working conditions, among others. Women writers addressed these issues not only in socially and politically engaged journalism, but also in fiction, essays, and other forms of writing. This special issue explores the relationship between women’s writing and social and political activism, from the 1890s to the 1950s. The collection comprises a series of case studies, with a focus on non-canonical authors and under-read works. Responding to recent calls for more scholarship on women writers in the period, contributors seek to recover the place of social and political activism in shaping women writers’ relationships to modernity. The collection at once foregrounds neglected writings by activist women and highlights the diversity of generic forms through which activism was expressed, thus enriching our understanding of women’s contributions to early twentieth-century literary and cultural history. The essays included here engage with a wide range of genres, many of them understudied. Doing so enables contributors to reassess women’s writings that seldom feature in anthologies or syllabi—goals that have always been central to feminist scholarship","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"1 1","pages":"163 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83047244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}