Modernism, Feminism and the Culture of Boredom New Edition
Author(s): Allison Pease (Author)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 18 Oct. 2012
Edition: New
Language: English
Print length: 174 pages
ISBN-10: 1107027578
ISBN-13: 9781107027572
Book Description
Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. Whether in popular offerings such as Robert Hitchens’s The Garden of Allah, the esteemed middlebrow novels of May Sinclair or H. G. Wells, or now-canonized works such as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, women’s boredom frequently serves as narrative impetus, antagonist and climax. In this book, Allison Pease explains how the changing meaning of boredom reshapes our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, feminism’s struggle to define women as individuals and male modernists’ preoccupation with female sexuality. To this end, Pease characterizes boredom as an important category of critique against the constraints of women’s lives, arguing that such critique surfaces in modernist fiction in an undeniably gendered way. Engaging with a wide variety of well- and lesser-known modernist writers, Pease’s study will appeal especially to researchers and graduates in modernist studies and British literature.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘Allison Pease’s book is a valuable contribution to the study of the modernist movement. Her joint literary and cultural studies approach allows her to couple history and the study of some of the major texts of modernism.’ Alice Braun, Université Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-la Défense
‘Pease is a compelling writer and meticulous critic. She makes boredom out to be, in certain instances, a feminist critique of women’s enforced social passivity; at other times, a literary device that asserts feminine will; and finally, in Woolf’s bleak vision, an invitation to take a philosophical voyage into the inhuman … Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom is a well-written, important contribution to literary studies of affect in the works of modernist women.’ Ria Banerjee, Journal of Modern Literature
Book Description
Illustrates how boredom formed an important category of critique against the constraints of women’s lives in British modernist literature.
About the Author
Allison Pease is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY, where she also serves as Chair of the English department. She is author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000) and has published widely in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, Criticism, The Journal of Gender Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature. She received her MA and PhD in English Literature from New York University.
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