Special Issue of Women's Writing: 1900-1920

Parsons, Jo ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2884-6676 (2024) Special Issue of Women's Writing: 1900-1920. [Journal]

Abstract / Summary

The period from 1900 to 1920 falls partially into several of the canonical categories used to periodize early twentieth-century literature, yet is often wholly defined by them. Is this the tail end of the fin de siècle? Should these decades be viewed as a gestational waiting space in which the high modernism of the 1920s would soon develop? Should we view them through the largely masculinist lens of a war which did not begin until 1914? Each of these frames embodies an instance of what Raymond Williams termed ‘the selective critical tradition’, rendering huge areas of literary production invisible even as it frames the canon of primary texts which receive the greater majority of our critical attention.
This special issue looks to reframe these first two decades of the twentieth century. In this moment the address of women writers to their readers broadened its focus in a lively publishing landscape. This was a period in which social movements, including the suffrage movement, inspired a wealth of fiction and non-fiction publishing. There was also a tremendous growth in popular weekly magazines in these decades, including new story magazines, many aimed at working women, their desires, and their practical needs. Women novelists wrote for a whole group of new publishers taking advantage of new methods of book production and distribution and new cultures of review. In the present moment examinations of each of these phenomena are often divided by disciplinary boundaries and/or underexamined altogether.

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