Revisiting the Poetics and Politics of Modernism - The Women of 1922

This book revisits women’s literature in 1922, long hailed as the miracle year of literary modernism, a landmark year of avant-garde innovations in publications that included James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Yet if 1922 has been considered a modernist annus mirabilis, it was many things besides. In “1922 or thereabouts,” according to Willa Cather, the literary “world broke in two,” sequestering traditional writers from those considered modern. Many women writers produced work that year across a spectrum of genres, forms, and politics that would not be accepted into Hugh Kenner’s modernist canon. Nor, however, did they readily fit into Cather’s categories, in some cases rupturing, and in other cases affirming a consensus of modernism as a masculinist, culturally imperialist interwar enterprise. Considering 1922’s historical significance, the essays in this collection seek greater inclusion of women in our memory of this year, including writers from a range of global and regional contexts and cultural backgrounds. Extending other attempts to examine the gender politics of modernism/modernity over the past thirty years, the project draws connections between the significance of 1922, as it has been understood in the new modernist studies, and feminist literary criticism that utilizes single-year approaches, to revisit and reflect on women’s history and the gender politics of modernism.
amlyn Avery is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and a senior research fellow in American Studies at the University of Queensland. Specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. literature and modernism, she is author of The Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960 (2023), and an editor of the Australasian Modernist Studies Association’s journal, Affirmations: of the Modern. She has published extensively on American and African American Literature, modernism, and modern women’s writing and poetry in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, American Literature, the African American Review, and elsewhere.
Sascha Morrell is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. She has published widely on U.S. and modernist literatures, including chapters in The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel (2023) and The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell (2025). Sascha’s research has also examined Australian literature in transnational contexts, the overlap between competing constructions of “the south” globally, and the appropriation of Haitian history and cultural motifs (including the zombie) in modern U.S. fiction, theatre, and film.  
 
 

List of contents

Editor’s Introduction. Revisiting the Women of 1922
Dr Tamlyn Avery (University of Queensland) and Dr Sascha Morrell (Monash University)
 
SECTION 1. Transnational Networks, Trajectories, & Translations
 
Chapter 1. 1922 Internationals: The Work of Mina Loy and Rose Macaulay
Professor Rachel Potter (University of East Anglia)
 
Chapter 2. The Migrations and Filiations of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and the Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Loringhoven in 1922
Professor Mark Byron (University of Sydney)
 
Chapter 3. Newness, Memory, and Tradition in Karin Boye’s ‘Moln’
Dr Karin Sellberg (The University of Queensland)
 
SECTION 2. Curations, Experiments, & Reinventions of the Self
 
Chapter 4. Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays as a Modernist Text
 Professor Julian Murphet (University of Adelaide)
 
Chapter 5. Lu Yin and Chinese New Culture Literary Experiments
Professor Yi Zheng (UNSW Sydney)
 
Chapter 6. Willa Cather’s Poetic Ambivalence: The April Twilights Revisions
Dr Tamlyn Avery (University of Queensland) and Ms Clare Charlesworth (University of Adelaide)
 
 
SECTION 3. Gender & the Politics of Genre
 
Chapter 7. “A flower blooming in the prison yard:” Love, Sex, and Respectability in Harlem Renaissance Women’s Poetry
Associate Professor Michelle Pinkard (Tennessee State University)
 
Chapter 8. Face Off: Finding Critical Difference in the Satire of Amy Lowell and Mina Loy
Professor Ann Vickery (Deakin University)
 
Chapter 9. Nora’s Sisters: Korean Women Writers of 1922
 Dr Jung Ja Choi (Harvard University)
 
SECTION 4. Reinterpretations & Critical Receptions
 
Chapter 10. Gabriela Mistral’s Modern Refusal of Modernism
Professor Claudia Cabello-Hutt (University of North Carolina) and Professor Emilia Phillips (University of North Carolina)
 
Chapter 11. Revisiting Edith Wharton’s Remaking as a Modernist
Dr Sascha Morrell (Monash University)
 
Chapter 12. “[N]ot … an unexpected contingency”: Sarah Gertrude Millin’s Adam’s Rest (1922), Colonial Envy, and Modernism’s Racism
Professor Andrew van der Vlies (University of Adelaide)
 
Chapter 13. Katherine Mansfield, Heresy, Critique
Professor Simon During (University of Melbourne)

About the author

Tamlyn Avery is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and a senior research fellow in American Studies at the University of Queensland. Specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. literature and modernism, she is author of The Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960 (2023), and an editor of the Australasian Modernist Studies Association’s journal, Affirmations: of the Modern. She has published extensively on American and African American Literature, modernism, and modern women’s writing and poetry in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, American Literature, the African American Review, and elsewhere.
Sascha Morrell is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. She has published widely on U.S. and modernist literatures, including chapters in The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel (2023) and The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell (2025). Sascha’s research has also examined Australian literature in transnational contexts, the overlap between competing constructions of “the south” globally, and the appropriation of Haitian history and cultural motifs (including the zombie) in modern U.S. fiction, theatre, and film.  
 

Summary

This book revisits women’s literature in 1922, long hailed as the miracle year of literary modernism, a landmark year of avant-garde innovations in publications that included James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Yet if 1922 has been considered a modernist annus mirabilis, it was many things besides. In “1922 or thereabouts,” according to Willa Cather, the literary “world broke in two,” sequestering traditional writers from those considered modern. Many women writers produced work that year across a spectrum of genres, forms, and politics that would not be accepted into Hugh Kenner’s modernist canon. Nor, however, did they readily fit into Cather’s categories, in some cases rupturing, and in other cases affirming a consensus of modernism as a masculinist, culturally imperialist interwar enterprise. Considering 1922’s historical significance, the essays in this collection seek greater inclusion of women in our memory of this year, including writers from a range of global and regional contexts and cultural backgrounds. Extending other attempts to examine the gender politics of modernism/modernity over the past thirty years, the project draws connections between the significance of 1922, as it has been understood in the new modernist studies, and feminist literary criticism that utilizes single-year approaches, to revisit and reflect on women’s history and the gender politics of modernism.
 

Product details

• Assisted by: Tamlyn Avery (Editor), Morrell (Editor), Sascha Morrell (Editor)
• Publisher: Springer International Publishing
• Languages: English, German
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 07.10.2025
• EAN: 9783031952432
• ISBN: 978-3-031-95243-2
• Illustrations: Approx. 320 p.
• Series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Literaturwissenschaft: 1900 bis 2000, Feminism, Feminismus und feministische Theorie, Poetry, Modernism, Poetics, Feminism and feminist theory, Poetry and Poetics, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary History, Women's Literature