This course will give you an overview of early-twentieth-century women's fiction by focusing on four key modernist writers: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. You will be introduced to these authors' daring and original styles by looking at their short fiction: the short story being the form which first allowed them the freedom to experiment with their radically new take on literature.
These women writers' participation in the literary and cultural innovations of modernism will be examined in the contexts which made their contributions and rise possible, and where they played a lively, and sometimes crucial, role: the little magazine, the small press, and the literary salon in the cosmopolitan cities of London, Paris and New York.
In their different ways, through the distinctive voices of their authors, all the stories studied in this course offer a glimpse of women's unconventional, and at the time marginalised, perspectives: their sideways glance at society, their emphasis on intense moments of emotion and visual and auditory effects over traditional narrative, and their attention to small and everyday objects, which they infuse with a profound sense of mystery.
Eschewing plot and resolution in favour of ellipsis and unanswered questions, these stories are above all a kaleidoscope of women's lives at a moment of transition, and a window onto the neglected topic of relationships between women. In this spirit, and as part of our discovery of women writers of the early twentieth century, the course will also include a trip to the bookshop of a publisher which reprints less well-known women authors of the period.