Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word

by Suzanne Clark

The sentimental and the modern : a common history -- Anarchy as a literary figure, anarchy as a female form / Emma Goldman -- Jouissance and the sentimental daughter / Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Medusa and melancholy : the fatal allure of beauty in Louise Bogan's poetry -- Revolution, the woman, and the word / Kay Boyle -- The woman in nature and the subject of nonfiction / Annie Dillard -- The sentimental and the critical : maternal irony, Alice Walker, and a feminist conclusion.

Genres: Feminism

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1991

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

According to this book, modernism, sentimental or not, is American (or possibly French), and so is feminism. The only reference to Virginia Woolf, certainly a prominent modernist woman writer by anyone’s standards, is a comparison of the dying moth image in Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm to Woolf’s, which is neither described nor quoted. Clark’s discussions of specific writers are often interesting, especially in the chapters about the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan, and I enjoyed considering Annie Dillard and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as postmodern developments. However, too much of the prose relies on words like “recuperates,” and the book’s 1991 publication date seems late for such fervent opposition to John Crowe Ransom and New Criticism. As Clark acknowledges, plenty of critics were already examining and accepting the ideological content that had been “forbidden.”