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Notes Introduction 1. Conrad, Lord Jim, 41–42. This work will hereinafter be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 2. Gilbert and Gubar, The War, 3. Marianne DeKoven takes a similar approach in Rich and Strange (1991), where she argues that under the impress of feminism male modernists generally “feared the loss of their own hegemony implicit in such wholesale revisions of culture.” Claire Kahane also reads male modernists in terms of their “alarm at the feminist challenges to male privileges.” And Ann L. Ardis asks: “Is the strident ‘maleness’ of modernism a way of marking turf and engendering difference from the novels written about and ‘for’ women at the turn of the century?” DeKoven, 20; Kahane, 64; Ardis, 171. 3. Nicholls, 61; Scott, B., Refiguring Modernism, 183; Pykett, “Writing around Modernism ,” 109; Henke, 326. This formulation of an anxious, masculinist modernism underpins an impressive number of other works: monographs such as Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Benstock 1986); Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (DeKoven 1991); Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (Pykett 1995); New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (Ardis 1990); Difference in View: Women and Modernism (Griffin 1994); Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism, and the Edwardian Novel (Miller 1994); Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (Ouditt 1994); and (in virtually every essay ) anthologies such as The Gender of Modernism (Scott 1990); Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism (Dettmar 1992); Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach (Rado 1997); Gendered Modernisms (Dickie and Travasino 1996); and Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Rereadings (Harrison and Peterson 1997). 4. Butler, Gender, 33. 5. Jauss, 935. 6. Dettmar, 1. Bonnie Kime Scott notes that “we have been forwarded a narrower version of male modernists than. . . they offered themselves”; and Lisa Rado likewise argues that the “English departments of the 1950s and 1960s engaged in a massive cultural ‘forgetting’ that repressed the existence of central female modernist writers . . . while elevating select male writers . . . to an unassailable literary elite.” Michael Kaufman goes further, arguing that the male domination of modernist poetry has less to do with the poets than with a “male bias to critics in their histories, accounts, and definitions of modernism that typically have obscured . . . women writers’ contributions.” Scott, Refiguring, 82; Rado, “Lost and Found,” 4; Kaufman, “Gendering Modernism,” 59. 7. Benstock, Women, x. 8. Dickie and Travasino, 120. 9. Eysteinsson makes this point about Gilbert and Gubar’s No Man’s Land, noting that “Maleness is reconstituted as a monolithic, logocentric foundation of meaning . . . in order to enhance the subversive elements of women’s writing.” Eysteinsson, 96. 10. Spivak, 226. 11. So Shari Benstock refuses to write from a “single—genderized—perspective” or to define a single “Modernist feminist poetics”; yet her work, by exposing “all that Modernism has repressed,” locates after all a singularly monumental coercive force against which, and only against which, the “female subtext” becomes legible. Lyn Pykett, despite her claim for the “fluid, contradictory and conflicted” moment of modernism, can also write that the fiction of May Sinclair and Rebecca West is not “predicated on that rupture with the feminine and/or feminized writing of the past which was written into the manifestos of many of the male modernists.” The list of similar cases could be extended almost indefinitely. Alice Gambrell, citing Gilbert and Gubar’s attack on Harold Bloom’s concept of the anxiety of influence, notes that female modernists seek out “multiple intellectual ancestries, patrilineal and matrilineal”—whereas men have to engage in a “pitched battle with a mighty (and usually male) antecedent.” Suzette A. Henke writes that what we need is a “redefinition of modernism as a period of transformation fed by a multiplicity of genres and voices and constructed by a series of experimental texts”—one reason being that “gender is . . . a fluid and indeterminate subject position defined by competing discursive practices.” Yet “high modernism” is neither fluid nor indeterminate nor marked by competing discourses, for its evolution has “traditionally presented itself as a logocentric and phallocentric project.” High modernism thereby becomes the unchanging center by which we know what ‘gender’ actually is. Benstock, Women, x; Pykett, 120; Gambrell, 25, 24, x; Henke, 326, 327, 326. 12. Hugh Stevens’s introduction to Modernist Sexualities (2000) notes that “More work needs to be done on how modernist men might not have been complicit with but may have resisted hegemonic structures of masculinity.” Of the two essays...

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