Cultures of Modernism

Examines the influences of location on the literary achievements of three modernist women writers. ""Cultures of Modernism"" shows how the structure and location of literary communities significantly influence who writes, what they write about, and their openness to formal experimentation - and in particular, women writers. There are striking patterns of similarity in the concerns and lives of women living in geographically distant centers of modernist production. The author looks at three significant poets - the American Marianne Moore, the British expatriate Mina Loy, and the German Else Lasker-Shuler - in the context of cultural, national and local elements to argue that location significantly affected their performances of subjectivity, gender, race, and religion. The book distinctively attends to women's nationally defined economic, legal, and educational opportunities, and reveals these writers' uncommonly enlightened attitudes toward Judaism. The first book of its kind, Cultures of Modernism breaks new ground while it contributes to the ongoing reconception of the modernist period.