Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction

Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction

English, Elizabeth

Paperback

Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 147442449X
ISBN13: 9781474424493
Publisher: Edinburgh Univ Pr
Published: Apr 30 2017
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

The first book-length study to explore the importance of genre fiction for the body of literature we call lesbian modernism
Elizabeth English explores the aesthetic dilemma prompted by the censorship of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Faced with legal and financial reprisals, women writers were forced to question how they might represent lesbian identity and desire. Modernist experimentation has often been seen as a response to this problem, but English breaks new ground by arguing that popular genre fictions offered a creative strategy against the threat of detection and punishment. Her study examines a range of responses to this dilemma by offering illuminating close readings of fantasy, crime, and historical fictions written by both mainstream and modernist authors. English introduces hitherto neglected women writers from diverse backgrounds and draws on archival material examined here for the first time to remap the topography of 1920s-1940s lesbian literature and to reevaluate the definition of lesbian modernism.

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