Abstract

Many studies of poetic modernism focus on the avatars of High Modernism, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, who created a critical coterie based on culture and class. A New Matrix for Modernism introduces a matrilineage for modernism that traces a distinct women's poetic voice from the Bronte sisters through Alice Meynell to modernists Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham who combine feminist content with an innovative exploration of formalist prosody. Shifting emphasis from woman to child, mother to daughter, and urbs to suburb, relocating modernism's matrilingua to the boundaries of London society and culture, A NewMatrix for Modernism ranges widely among architecture, mental illness, Fabianism, Positivism, Theosophy, women's suffrage and education to a new house for modernism-a woman's place of secret joys and sorrows. Well researched yet passionate, this book will appeal to both the scholar and the generalist interested in modernism, poetry, feminism, culture and British literary history.