Acknowledgments Introduction: Myths of the Modern 1. Modernity and Feminism 2. On Nostalgia: The Prehistoric Woman 3. Imagined Pleasures: The Erotics and Aesthetics of consumption 4. Masking Masculinity: The Feminization of Writing 5. Love, God, and the Orient: Reading the Popular Sublime 6. Visions of the New: feminist Discourses of Evolution and revolution 7. The Art of Perversion: Female Sadists and male Cyborgs Afterword: Rewriting the Mordern Notes Index
Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Felski immerses herself in the messy ambiguities, symbioses, and
contradictions of the modern to a degree that is rare and bravely
ambitious. The book addresses an abundance of topics—fin de siècle
sociological and psychoanalytic theory, consumer behavior, the
aesthetics of decadence and sexual perversion, the rhetoric of
first-wave feminism. While never ungenerous, Felski dismantles some
recent favored assumptions. Reading her book, one feels that we are
profligate with the words ‘subversive,’ ‘transgressive,’ and
‘resisting’ as terms of approbation. Felski recognizes that
assessing the degree and kind of resistance requires deep knowledge
of the context in which it occurs.
*Lingua Franca*
[An] important book… Felski has a talent for seeing how feminist
questions are implicated in other kinds of cultural questions—and
can be changed by them… By deftly combining cultural history and
critical theory, becoming more deeply historicist in her scrutiny
of fin de siècle modern literature in its various Anglo-American
and European contexts, she uncovers some of the earlier,
conflicting stories of a feminist aesthetics from within the
philosophical and cultural webs in which they have long been
entangled. This second book, then, by delving more deeply into
intellectual antecedents of our assumptions about modern aesthetic
genres, gives even more grounding to her earlier study. We now know
more about the number of ways in which questions of feminist
aesthetics have been only one aspect of the ‘culture of women’s
modernity’ all along.
*South Carolina Review*
To entitle a book The Gender of Modernity is boldly to run the risk
posed by handling overfamiliar concepts. Rita Felski has run that
risk with expert skill, producing an important study which succeeds
in its aim ‘to unravel the complexities of modernity’s relationship
to femininity through an analysis of its varied and competing
representations.’ Her project combines cultural theory with
cultural history, seeking ‘to establish points of connection
between the texts of the past and the feminist politics of the
present.’
*The Year’s Work in English Studies*
The amplitude of Felski’s critical range and critical sympathies
makes this a superb meditation on gender, and on modernity, taken
separately and taken together, as Felski finally persuades us they
must be. There is no other study I know of with the breadth of
interest and the alertness to changing theoretical valences. Felski
might be said to be writing an informed poststructuralist
historical materialism, with energy and bravura. It would not be
going too far to say that this is a wise book: scrupulously fair,
politically committed, intellectually inclusive,
interdisciplinarily exciting.
*Jennifer Wicke, New York University*
Felski demonstrates the centrality of gender and sexuality for the
culture of modernism/modernity, and she does it in complex and
subtle ways, making use of contemporary theory as much as of
historical studies of the material at hand. As in her earlier book,
Felski displays solid, up-to-date scholarly knowledge and a welcome
sobriety in dealing with the often overheated theoretical
discourses in the field. Her critiques of feminist,
poststructuralist, Marxist, and other now common lines of argument
are always fair, her writing is lucid, and her arguments sparkle
with insight.
*Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University*
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