Ann Ardis

Modernism and Cultural Conflict recovers a turn-of-the-twentieth-century British cultural landscape in which literary modernism did not (yet) throw gigantic shadows as it asks the following questions:  how did modernism come to be perceived as the aesthetic of modernity?  What other aesthetic and political agendas were erased from cultural memory or discredited as the modernist avant-garde acquired cultural legitimacy?  How are the edges, the margins, and even the limitations of modernism revealed when we attend to the ways it intersects with, borrows from, and reacts against other cultural enterprises? Modernism and Cultural Conflict addresses key changes in the public sphere that bear upon  modernism’s first emergence in the pre-war period:  the consolidation of modern disciplinary distinctions, the emergence and decline of aesthetic forms such as film and music hall theatre, the debates about literature’s role in culture generated by socialism and the women’s suffrage campaign. 

Review

"Ardis has … written a provocative and illuminating book that should be read by all cultural and social historians hoping to gain a sense of the new versions of modernism being explored today." --Cultural and Social History

Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945 (co-edited with Leslie Lewis; Johns Hopkins, 2002)

In Women’s Experience of Modernity, feminine phenomena move from the margins of the study of modernity to its center.  Analyzing such cultural practices as selling and shopping, political and social activism, urban field work and rural labor, radical discourses on feminine sexuality, and literary and artistic experimentation, the contributors to this anthology historicize the literary field and attend to contemporary theoretical concerns informing their recovery of women’s literature and history as they also address “the gender of modernism.”