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Daily ModernismThe Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin |
eBook Available
In contrast to autobiographies, which are intended for a public audience and can be read as a novel, diaries have traditionally been thought of as the private record of a person's life. In Daily Modernism Elizabeth Podnieks shows that the diary can and should be read as both autobiography and fiction.
Redrawing established boundaries between genres, Podnieks builds a broad critical and theoretical range on which she maps the diary as an aesthetic work, showing how diaries inscribe the aesthetics of literary modernisms. Drawing on feminist theory, literary history, biography, and personal anecdotes, she argues that the diary is an especially subversive space for women writers. Podnieks details how Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin wrote their diaries under the pretence that they were private, while always intending them to be published. She travelled extensively to examine the original diary manuscripts and offers unique first-hand descriptions of the manuscripts that underscore the artistic intentions of their authors.
Daily Modernism contributes to the ongoing feminist revision of literary history and, in its disruption of traditional concepts of "major" and "minor" literary forms, paves the way for a much needed reconsideration of the diary as a valid literary achievement.
Redrawing established boundaries between genres, Podnieks builds a broad critical and theoretical range on which she maps the diary as an aesthetic work, showing how diaries inscribe the aesthetics of literary modernisms. Drawing on feminist theory, literary history, biography, and personal anecdotes, she argues that the diary is an especially subversive space for women writers. Podnieks details how Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin wrote their diaries under the pretence that they were private, while always intending them to be published. She travelled extensively to examine the original diary manuscripts and offers unique first-hand descriptions of the manuscripts that underscore the artistic intentions of their authors.
Daily Modernism contributes to the ongoing feminist revision of literary history and, in its disruption of traditional concepts of "major" and "minor" literary forms, paves the way for a much needed reconsideration of the diary as a valid literary achievement.
Details
424 Pages
ISBN 9780773520219
January 2000
Formats: Cloth, eBook
"Daily Modernism refines and extends research on diary writing by explicating the literary aspects of diary making. It claims a place for diaries as public texts and begins to assert a female modernist tradition, anchoring that tradition in life writing." Helen M. Buss, Department of English, University of Calgary and author of Mapping Ourselves: Canadian Women's Autobiography
"A most valuable contribution to the current debates in life writing circles. Podnieks' ability to synthesize traditions of criticism, current feminist and life writing theory and extant knowledge about the history and genre of the diary is most adroitly fashioned and also persuasively executed." Marlene Kadar, former director of the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies, York University
"A most valuable contribution to the current debates in life writing circles. Podnieks' ability to synthesize traditions of criticism, current feminist and life writing theory and extant knowledge about the history and genre of the diary is most adroitly fashioned and also persuasively executed." Marlene Kadar, former director of the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies, York University
Elizabeth Podnieks has recently completed a SSHRCC post-doctoral fellowship during which she did research on Emily Holmes Colman. She has taught at the University of Toronto and Ryerson Polytechnic University.
