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From the Modernist Annex

From the Modernist Annex

American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries

by Karin Roffman

272 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 1.20 in

Hardcover
9780817316983
Published: May 2010

$44.95

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eBook
9780817383961
Published: July 2010

$44.95

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Description
Contents
Authors

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the majority of women were forced to seek their education outside the walls of American universities. Many turned to museums and libraries, for their own enlightenment, for formal education, and also for their careers. In Roffman’s close readings of four modernist writers—Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, and Ruth Benedict—she studied the that modernist women writers were simultaneously critical of and shaped by these institutions.

From the Modernist Annex offers new and critically significant ways of understanding these writers and their texts, the distribution of knowledge, and the complicated place of women in modernist institutions.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Women and the Mutual Development of Museums and Libraries

2. Museums and Memory in Edith Wharton’s Modern Novels

3. Nella Larsen, Librarian at 135th Street

4. Accidents Happen in Marianne Moore’s Native Habitat

5. Finding Freedom from Museums and Libraries in Ruth Benedict’s Poetry

Conclusion

Notes