Author Description

Modernist women writers were innovators both in terms of what and how they wrote. They revised patriarchal norms of writing by first setting out to destroy binary oppositions, which, they insisted, imposed restrictions on women's gender, sex, race, and creativity. Early proponents of what today we know as social construction theory, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle saw gender not as an ontological essence but rather as a construction, produced in acts of social performance: as costume or garment that might be donned or stripped, as it pleases the wearer, but certainly tailored to each individual. This book takes the reader back to the 1920s by exploring the experimental fiction of this grand generation. It examines the narrative strategies and untraditional literary choices women writers made in order to create a new fictional space for themselves. For it is in this separate fictional sphere where they lived and wrote their experiences as women and created female subjectivities freed from binary categories.