Ordinary Matters

Modernist Women's Literature and Photography

By: Lorraine Sim

Write A Review

Paperback | 19 April 2018

At a Glance

Paperback
248 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.3

Paperback

RRP $74.99

$70.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $17.69 with

Ships in 3 to 5 business days

Shortlisted for the 2017 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship

Ordinary Matters is the first major interdisciplinary study of the ordinary in modernist women's literature and photography. It examines how women photographers and writers including Helen Levitt, Lee Miller, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson envision the sphere of ordinary life in light of the social and cultural transformations of the period that shaped and often radically re-shaped it: for example, urbanism, instrumentalism, the Great Depression and war. Through a series of case studies that explore such topics as the street, domestic things, gesture and the face, Sim contends that the paradigmatic shifts that define early twentieth-century modernity not only inform modernist women's aesthetics of the everyday, but their artistic and ethical investments in that sphere.

The everyday has been noted as a "keynote of the New Modernist Studiesâ ? (Todd Avery). Ordinary Matters comprises a vital contribution to recent scholarship on the topic and will be of value to scholars working in British and American modernism, multimedia modernisms, photography, twentieth-century literature, and critical and cultural histories of the everyday.

Industry Reviews

Situated at the intersection of modernism studies and the study of everyday life, Ordinary Matters is a richly informed and arrestingly insightful study. Productively collocating the disparate work of writers Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, and photographers Helen Levitt, Dorothy Lange, Lee Miller, and Margaret Monck, Sim challenges Marxist and feminist critical traditions that see the quotidian as a problem to be overcome, compellingly demonstrating how these female authors and photographers found affective, political, and ethical value and import in ordinary experience.
Todd Avery, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA

Shipping

	Standard Shipping	Express Shipping
Metro postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Regional postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Rural postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95

How to return your order

At Booktopia, we offer hassle-free returns in accordance with our returns policy. If you wish to return an item, please get in touch with Booktopia Customer Care.

Additional postage charges may be applicable.