Prior Commitments: Multiply Affiliated Women Writers and Modernism's Shifting Boundaries

"The literary worlds subsumed under the heading ""modernism"" were made up of a wide array of collectives with different identities, agendas, and spheres of influence. Rather than a strong affiliation with one high-profile group, women and members of other ""marginal"" groups often had multiple commitments to modernist and nonmodernist circles, both by choice and of necessity. This dissertation considers how modernist impulses combine with an array of other commitments and strategies in the work of three women writers---Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Dorothy Parker---in ways that shed light on modernism's vexed but at times productive relationship with mass culture. Negotiating various avant-garde, traditional, and mass cultural affiliations, Loy, Millay, and Parker created work that troubles the dividing lines often drawn in discussions of modernism between ironic and sentimental, experimental and traditional, and high and low art. Their skill at combining influences from their multiple affiliations enabled these writers to create feminist revisions of both modern irony and traditional sentiment. Despite different and seemingly disparate careers, Loy, Millay, and Parker were all part of a modernity that, far from breaking cleanly with a ""feminized"" past and an anathematized mass culture, drew on and forged connections with the past and the popular present."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Majerus, Elizabeth Anne

Contributors dc:contributor

• Janet Lyon

• Women's Studies

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3030458

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81380