CFP: Feminist Modernist Studies Special Issue (Summer 2025)
Modernist Legacies / Contemporary Women

Co-editors: Ella Ophir (University of Saskatchewan); Beth Rosenberg (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

How are contemporary women writers reconstituting the meanings of modernism? Across generations, from Ali Smith, Alison Bechdel, and Rachel Cusk, to Zadie Smith and Eimear McBride, to Asali Solomon and Sally Rooney, to emerging voices such as Natasha Brown and Raven Leilani, women are significant contributors to the body of twenty-first century writing that is reinterpreting the aesthetics, texts, and figures of the modernist era. In their landmark 2014 essay David James and Urmilla Seshagiri took stock of “twentieth-century modernism’s complex—but still undertheorized—appeal for the ambitions of twenty-first century novelists” (88). The next ten years brought sustained studies of the contemporary-modernist connection by Alys Moody (2018) and Carey Mickalites (2023), forums such as The Contemporaneity of Modernism (2016) and “Modernism’s Contemporary Affects” (2018), and in the past year, conferences in London and Frankfurt. However, just one major scholarly work has been devoted to women writers, Paige Reynolds’s Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing (2023).

Expanding the scope across nations, this special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies will bring feminist perspectives to bear on twenty-first century women’s responses to the gendered precedents and legacies of the modernist era. What versions of modernism are assumed or negotiated? What draws these women back to the scene of modernism, and what do they carry forward? How might such engagements inform feminist scholarship and teaching of modernism? Contributions might consider, for example:

– Contemporary engagements with specific modernist-era figures or works

– Contemporary engagements with modernist-era feminisms, gender politics, sexology

– Stylistic and affectual affinities with modernism in contemporary women’s writing

– Aesthetic autonomy and impersonality from modernism to contemporary autofiction

– Modernist texts in contemporary women’s bibliomemoir

– Contemporary feminist biographies of modernist-era figures

– The marketability or cultural status of modernism vis à vis women’s writing

– Versions and adaptations across media

– Models and metaphors for twentieth-century feminist literary history (waves, generations, archives, dialogues across time, canon formation)

– Genealogies: local, global, queer, racial

Advance inquiries are welcome. Proposals of 350-500 words along with a short bio (max. 100 words) should be sent to both editors by May 15: Ella Ophir e.ophir@usask.ca and Beth Rosenberg beth.rosenberg@unlv.edu. Selected submissions will be notified by June 15. Finished article drafts will be due by December 15, 2024; final edited manuscripts of 5000-7000 words will be due for production by May 2025.

Submissions on teaching modernism with and through contemporary women’s writing are also invited for the “From the Feminist Classroom” section of the journal. Contact Laura Hartmann-Villalta, lhartm13@jhu.edu.

Queries regarding relevant book reviews can be directed to Lauren Rosenblum, lrosenblum@adelphi.edu.