In this beautifully illustrated and provocative study, Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace reassess women's literary and artistic contribution to modernism. Deploying the work of Pierre Bourdieu to identify the cultural field of modernist production, Elliot and Wallace disclose the modernism, emphasizing the avant-gardist symbolics of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, the professionalism of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and the construction of female genius by Gertrude Stein and Maurie Laurencin. Closely and carefully attending to the particularistic and, at times, highly self-conscious constructions of the identity of women artists, Elliot and Wallace survey the various possibilities and constraints of interpellation, the cultural logics of their positions, as well as their relations vis-a-vis male artists. Not simply a study of the cultural field of modernism, this text provides a trenchant and compelling look at the way disciplines, such as English Literature and Art History, are implicitly andinsiduously instituted through their location of the formal qualities of the objects of cultural study. Breaking the divisions which pervade most of the major scholarship on the period,Women Artists and Writersprovides a critical and interdisciplinary intervention in and around the field of modernist cultural production.
Women Artists and Writers : Modernist (Im)Positionings