Modernism, Feminism and Everyday Life

Faced with a rapidly changing world, modernist authors turned their attention to the mundane details of everyday life, seeking new discourses and techniques to articulate their experiences of modernity. Drawing on theories of everyday life, Tara Thomson explores modernist fiction by women who were afforded new roles and opportunities in a world characterized by social and political change. At the same time the realities of women's everyday lives lagged behind the promises of modernity. Thomson reads the works of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen to explore the complex position of women with respect to everyday life throughout the interwar years. She focuses particularly on the unique narrative techniques these authors developed to reveal how everyday practices produce and are produced by ideology. Drawing on a substantial body of everyday theory, feminist theory, and the socio-historical contexts of modernism, Thomson's book asks what sustained attention to the everyday can tell us about the feminist aims of modernist fiction.

Tara Thomson is a research fellow at the Uninversity of Edinburgh, UK.