Ordinary Matters: Modernist Women's Literature and Photography

Description

Shortlisted for the 2017 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship Ordinary Matters is the first major interdisciplinary study of the ordinary in modernist women's literature and photography. It examines how women photographers and writers including Helen Levitt, Lee Miller, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson envision the sphere of ordinary life in light of the social and cultural transformations of the period that shaped and often radically re-shaped it: for example, urbanism, instrumentalism, the Great Depression and war. Through a series of case studies that explore such topics as the street, domestic things, gesture and the face, Sim contends that the paradigmatic shifts that define early twentieth-century modernity not only inform modernist women's aesthetics of the everyday, but their artistic and ethical investments in that sphere. The everyday has been noted as a "keynote of the New Modernist Studies" (Todd Avery). Ordinary Matters comprises a vital contribution to recent scholarship on the topic and will be of value to scholars working in British and American modernism, multimedia modernisms, photography, twentieth-century literature, and critical and cultural histories of the everyday.

Lorraine Sim is a Lecturer in Modern English Literature at Western Sydney University, Australia. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience (2010).

Situated at the intersection of modernism studies and the study of everyday life, Ordinary Matters is a richly informed and arrestingly insightful study. Productively collocating the disparate work of writers Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, and photographers Helen Levitt, Dorothy Lange, Lee Miller, and Margaret Monck, Sim challenges Marxist and feminist critical traditions that see the quotidian as a problem to be overcome, compellingly demonstrating how these female authors and photographers found affective, political, and ethical value and import in ordinary experience. -- Judging Panel of the AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship In the beautifully written, richly illustrated Ordinary Matters, Lorraine Sim shows why the ordinary - as a theoretical concept and as a collection of facts in the world - mattered to modernist writers and artists. To understand the subtleties of these engagements, and why they matter ethically and politically, few critics offer as penetrating and graceful help as Sim. * Todd Avery, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA * In Ordinary Matters Lorraine Sim consolidates her presence as a key figure in the field of modernist studies. This critically adept exploration of how the everyday figures in the work of modernist women writers and photographers establishes new terms for thinking about gender, modernity, modernism and the sphere of ordinary life. This is a substantial and novel intervention in both the theorization of the everyday and the gendering of modernism. * Maryanne Dever, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Technology Sydney, Australia * This innovative and compelling work challenges the field of everyday life studies by taking gender fully into account. Many of the field's presuppositions about the alienating experiences of modern life are overturned by these exhilarating readings that establish the value of the quotidian. Blending close assessments of modern women's literary texts and photographs with a rigorous engagement with everyday life theory, Sim digs deeply into the materiality of the ordinary so that pavements and storefronts, or shawls and boots, reveal the ways in which the 'ordinary matters.' Beautifully written and carefully researched, this work pushes the field of everyday life studies into vital new territory by positioning modern women writers and photographers in their rightful place as theorists of the everyday. * Barbara Green, Associate Professor of English, University of Notre Dame, USA *