A Review of: “Penny Farfan. Women, Modernism & Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Kavak, Enes. "THE FEMALE ACTIVIST AS HEROINE ON THE EDWARDIAN STAGE: ELIZABETH ROBINS ‘S VOTES FOR WOMEN!." B/ORDERS UNBOUND: TRANSGRESSING THE LIMITS IN ARTS AND HUMANITIES: 65.
This paper attempts to establish the actress, prominent suffragist and playwright Elizabeth Robins as a pioneer in women's theatre, whose Votes for Women! (1907) was the first popular suffrage play in the Edwardian age. The play, unlike many other one-act plays and monologues by female playwrights of the era, featured an innovative strategy of staging the spectacle of crowded political meetings held by suffragists in London at the time. Though Robins' work was, to some extent, influenced by her early experience as the renowned Ibsen actress and her relationship with William Archer, the architect of the New Drama Movement, and his idea of an intellectual theatre, her strategy could be characterized neither simply as an Ibsenite nor as an example of Archerian drama. Robins' play fusions a woman's first-hand experience of political activism and melodramatic staging to achieve popularity, theatricality and disseminate the feminist sentiment originated from the Edwardian suffrage movement. The paper aims to show how Robins constructed a political heroine in Votes for Women! as a role model for both ordinary and politically-minded women and to what extend she exploited the strategies of the Edwardian popular stage to generate a successful and sensational political play at a time when women were not regarded as competent playwrights.
Editor’s introduction: toward feminist modernisms
Feminist Modernist Studies, 2017
When in 2012 we first began seeking a publisher for our proposed journal, we were told by a major press that Feminist Modernist Studies was "not needed" and librarians would not "know how to classify it" (?) We wondered how scholarship on modernism and feminism/ gender/sexuality could be simultaneously unnecessary (e.g. already done, fully integrated into modernist studies) and not recognizable as a category of academic study. Yet, even modernist feminist critics confess that feminism/gender appears oddly "everywhere and nowhere" 1 in nearly two decades of conference papers and publications emerging from the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its affiliated journal Modernism/Modernity (M/M). Upon closer scrutiny of these and other "new modernist" venues, feminist critics note that gender issues are either largely omitted, summarily added on, 2 orwithin feminist scholarshipsubsumed under modernism's broader intellectual expansions into globalization, cultural studies, and interdisciplinarity. Feminism/gender rarely serves as a point of entry into the new modernisms, yet critics continue to do important feminist work. Indeed, ironically, as Jessica Berman observes in this issue, feminist inquiry actually "helped to make possible the transnational, along with other recent 'turns' … in modernist studies" and "it [tacitly] undergirds much of the best work." Perhaps as Urmila Seshagiri suggests of the new modernism "one disciplinary process of expansion … overwhelm[ed] another." 3 Yet many feminist critics wary of being labeled old fashioned have felt pressured to authenticate their scholarship on women, gender, or feminist issues by establishing upfront its primary intent to illuminate other political, global, cultural, and interdisciplinary agendas. Accordingly, the gendered readings embedded ("everywhere") in these modernist studies leave unspoken ("nowhere") their often complexly interwoven implications, variously: for the sex/gendered constitutions of modernism; women's roles in shaping modernity; the suppression and recovery of lost modernist women writers; or the ways in which taking gender/the body/women as a point of entry might expand and/or completely alter current definitions of modernism. Setting aside the truth that feminist recovery work is never fully exhausted or "already done," we have not yet witnessed an intensive, large-scale exploration of gender and modernism in literature, art, and cultural studies. With notable exceptions, the 1980s and 1990s' surge of feminist inquiry during the self-described "post-modernist" era by definition evaded the modern period for the preferred study of Victorian, (queer) Decadent, and contemporary literature/culture/theory. 4 Modernism was then out of fashion, equated with T.S. Eliot and the New Critics' reactionary politics, elitism, and ahistoricism. Literary
Performing Genders: Three Plays on the Power of Women
The essay argues for a reading of two major female playwrights, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, within the tradition of women's 19th-century dramas rather than as Schiller-'epigones'--even in cases in which their plays explicitly take on issues raised by Schiller. In this light, it offers an analysis of Ebner-Eschenbach's Maria Stuart and Birch-Pfeiffer's Queen Elizabeth as 'answers' to Schiller's Maria and Elisabeth in 'Maria Stuart'.