Author Description

Women's experience in the first half of the twentieth century was shaped by changes in their legal status, education, employment, and by their struggle for a redefinition of themselves and their place in society. Rejecting the literary and cultural assumptions of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, women novelists, poets, and playwrights of the modernist period used such innovations as shifting narrators, unconventional plots, imagism and symbolism, and the interior monologue to challenge literary and social traditions. Women of this experimental literary period--diverse writers ranging from Amy Lowell and Hilda Doolittle to Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston--explored such themes as the nature of the self and of consciousness, the role of women and of the artist, and political, social, and personal oppression.<br/>In Experimental Lives Mary Loeffelholz examines the contributions of a broad range of women writers, providing a much-needed revision of the modernist canon and demonstrating the variety and originality of women's writing in this period. In such chapters as "The Women of Imagism," "British Women Novelists," and "Expatriates and Experimentalists," Loeffelholz discusses--by genre and theme--the different streams within the modernist movement, and analyzes the relationships between them. The study challenges traditional, male-oriented interpretations of the modernist period and comments in current criticism, from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's work to that of Toril Moi and Cary Nelson. Highlighting the volume is a foreword by noted feminist scholar Josephine Donovan. Experimental Lives is a stimulating, in-depth, and comprehensive critical guide that restores women's experience and writing to their rightful place in our understanding of this enormously creative and influential literary period.