This book revisits womens literature in 1922, long hailed as the miracle year of literary modernism, a landmark year of avant-garde innovations in publications that included James Joyces Ulysses, T. S. Eliots The Waste Land, and Ezra Pounds 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 Kenners modernist canon. Nor, however, did they readily fit into Cathers categories, in some cases rupturing, and in other cases affirming a consensus of modernism as a masculinist, culturally imperialist interwar enterprise. Considering 1922s 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 womens history and the gender politics of modernism.
Editors 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 Boyes Moln.-
Dr Karin Sellberg (The University of Queensland).- SECTION
2. Curations,
Experiments, & Reinventions of the Self.
Chapter
4. Gertrude Steins
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 Cathers 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 Womens 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. Noras Sisters:
Korean Women Writers of 1922 Dr Jung Ja Choi (Harvard University).- SECTION
4. Reinterpretations & Critical Receptions.
Chapter
10. Gabriela Mistrals
Modern Refusal of Modernism Professor Claudia Cabello-Hutt (University of
North Carolina) and Professor Emilia Phillips (University of North
Carolina).
Chapter
11. Revisiting Edith Whartons Remaking as a Modernist Dr
Sascha Morrell (Monash University).
Chapter
12. [ N]ot an unexpected
contingency: Sarah Gertrude Millins Adams Rest (1922), Colonial Envy, and
Modernisms Racism Professor Andrew van der Vlies (University of Adelaide).-
Chapter
13. Katherine Mansfield, Heresy, Critique Professor Simon During
(University of Melbourne).
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, 19001960 (2023), and an editor of the Australasian Modernist Studies Associations journal, Affirmations: of the Modern. She has published extensively on American and African American Literature, modernism, and modern womens 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). Saschas 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.
