Literary liaisons : auto/biographical appropriations in modernist women's fiction / Lynette Felber.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Felber, Lynette, 1951-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

American fiction.

American fiction--Women authors.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

Modernism (Literature).

United States.

Women and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

History.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--20th century.

Great Britain.

Autobiographical fiction, American--History and criticism.

Autobiographical fiction, American.

Autobiographical fiction, English--History and criticism.

Autobiographical fiction, English.

English fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

English fiction.

English fiction--Women authors.

Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.

Couples in literature.

Self in literature.

Physical Description:

xiv, 232 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, [2002]

Summary:

Unhappy relationships are the stuff of fiction--or so Lynette Felber observes as she examines the lives and fiction of five modernist women writers whose lovers were also literary figures. Focusing on Anaïs Nin, Rebecca West, Zelda Fitzgerald, Radclyffe Hall, and H.D., she investigates the ways these female authors made use of their relationships in their fiction. Whether heterosexual or lesbian, these women struggled to assert the authority of their own literary voices and to achieve professional recognition distinct from their partners. The modernist period, when British and American women first began to exercise their newly granted political rights, provides a particularly interesting backdrop for this study of literary appropriation. Using feminist and psychoanalytical theory, Felber views these emerging authors' fictionalized struggles as reenactments of the process by which the self differentiates itself from the Other. The literary liaison is the site where the female writer's professional identity is enacted, contested, and finally empowered or suppressed. As she examines the impact of literary relationships on modernist women writers, Felber reveals their preoccupation with attaining the status of "subject." The writers discussed in Literary Liaisons are well known for their various work--Rebecca West for her journalism, Anaïs Nin for her erotica, H.D. for her imagist poetry--as well as for their associations with such celebrated partners as H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller. The conflicts reflected in the five modernist women's writings stir a voyeuristic curiosity about the autobiographical truths that may lurk behind every fiction.

Contents:

Introduction

"Books Not of the Imagination" 3

1 The Many Faces of June

Anais Nin's Appropriation of Feminine Writing 32

2 Revenge and Parodic Appropriation in Rebecca West's Sunflower 58

3 Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

Household Plagiarism and Other Crimes of the Heart 88

4 Accommodation in Radclyffe Hall's The Forge 120

5 The Writer Self in H.D.'s Auto/biographical Fiction 142

Afterword

Alternative Mentors and Modes of Collaboration 185.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [209]-220) and index.

ISBN:

0875803016

OCLC:

49583632