The passion projects : modernist women, intimate archives, unfinished lives / Melanie Micir.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Micir, Melanie, Author.

Series:

Princeton scholarship online.

Princeton scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 197 pages) : facsimiles, portraits

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

How modernist women writers used biographical writing to resist their exclusion from literary historyIt's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. The Passion Projects examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others.Melanie Micir explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner's extensively annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes's fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson's collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf's joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these "passion projects" recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field.Arguing for the importance of biography, The Passion Projects shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Modernism's Unfinished Lives

Chapter 1. Intimate Archives: The Preservation of Partnership

Chapter 2. Abandoned Lives: Impossible Projects and Archival Remains

Chapter 3. Modernists Explain Things to Me: Collecting as Queer Feminist Response

Chapter 4. The Sense of Unending: Revisiting Virginia Woolf 's Orlando: A Biography

Coda. Biographical Criticism and the Passion Project Now

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2019.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780691194271

0691194270

OCLC:

1112419891