As a critical treatment of the living and writing that unfolded at the estate, 'Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics' asserts that female modernists who gathered there integrated public art with their private lives, thus making their personal writing works of experimental aesthetics.

The life story of the bohemian socialite who rebelled against her famous family and became a renowned art collector. Peggy Guggenheim was the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Her visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking “happening” at the center of its time. In Mistress of Modernism, Mary V. Dearborn draws upon her unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers to craft a “thorough biography . . . [that] will appeal to art lovers interested in more than the paint” (Publishers Weekly). “With drive and clarity, Dearborn charts Guggenheim’s peripatetic life,” offering rich insight into Peggy’s traumatic childhood in German-Jewish “Our Crowd” New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites (her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name just a few) (Booklist). Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggy’s last years as l’ultima dogaressa—the last (female) doge—in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year. Mistress of Modernism is the first definitive biography of Peggy Guggenheim, whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy Dearborn brings compellingly to life.

This study looks at the origins of the modernist movement, linking gender, modernism and the literary, before considering the bearing these discourses had on Djuna Barnes's writing. The main contribution of this innovative and scholarly work is the exploration of the editorial changes that T. S. Eliot made to the manuscript of Nightwood, as well as the revisions of the early drafts initiated by Emily Holmes Coleman. The archival research presented here is a significant advance in the scholarship, making this volume invaluable to both teachers and students of modern literature and Barnesian scholars.

In her captivating memoir, Out of This Century: The Informal Memoirs of Peggy Guggenheim, the renowned art collector and socialite takes readers on a fascinating journey through her extraordinary life. From her bohemian upbringing to her pivotal role in shaping the modern art world, Guggenheim's story is one of passion, resilience, and an unwavering commitment to the avant-garde. This intimate and candid account offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a visionary who left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape of the 20th century.

No aspect of modernist literature has attracted more passionate defenses, or more furious denunciations, than its affinity for the idea of autonomy. A belief in art as a law unto itself is central to the work of many writers from the late nineteenth century to the present. But is this belief just a way of denying art's social contexts, its roots in the lives of its creators, its political and ethical obligations? Fictions of Autonomy argues that the concept of autonomy is, on the contrary, essential for understanding modernism historically. Disputing the prevailing skepticism about autonomy, Andrew Goldstone shows that the pursuit of relative independence within society is modernism's distinctive way of relating to its contexts. Modernist autonomy is grounded in connections to servants and audiences, aging bodies and wardrobe choices; it joins T.S. Eliot to Adorno as exponents of late style and Djuna Barnes to Joyce as anti-communal cosmopolitans. Autonomy reveals new affinities across an expansive modernist field from Henry James and Proust to Stevens and de Man. Drawing on Bourdieu's sociology, formalist reading, and historical contextualization, this book shows autonomy's range--and its limitations--as a modernist mode of social practice. Nothing less than an argument for a wholesale revision of the assumptions of modernist studies, Fictions of Autonomy is also an intervention in literary theory. This book shows why anyone interested in literary history, the sociology of culture, and aesthetics needs to take account of the social, stylistic, and political significance of the problem, and the potential, of autonomy.

This book brings together in a comparative analysis the results of studies of the various cultural, social, economic and historical aspects that are formative in African societies’ experiences of how people negotiated the spaces and times of being in transit on the road to prosperity. The book analyses the various outcomes of the process of mobility and the experience of spaces and times of transit across gender, generational, and class-differences. These experiences are explored and give insight into the socio-cultural and economics transformations that have taken place in African societies in the past century. Contributors are: Akinyinka Akinyoade, Walter van Beek, Marleen Dekker, Ton Dietz, Rijk van Dijk, Isaie Dougnon, Jan-Bart Gewald, Meike de Goede, Benjamin Kofi Nyarko, Samuel Ntewusu Aniegye, Taiwo Olabisi Oluwatoyin, Shehu Tijjani Yusuf, Augustine Tanle and Amisah Zenabu Bakuri.

"... an invaluable aid to the reconfiguration of literary modernism and of the history of the fiction of the first three decades of the twentieth century." -- Novel "... her readings of texts are quite smart and eminently readable." -- Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature "... a challenging and discerning study of the modernist period." -- James Joyce Broadsheet (note: review of volume 1 only) "... highly important and beautifully written, constructing a contextually rich cultural history of Anglo-American modernism. It wears its meticulous erudition lightly, synthesizing an enormous amount of research, much of it original archival work." -- Signs "Through her thoughtful exploration of the lives and work of these three female modernists, Scott shapes a new feminist literary history that successfully reconfigures modernism." -- Woolf Studies Annual In this revisionary study of modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott focuses on the literary and cultural contexts that shaped Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Djuna Barnes. Her reading is based upon fresh archival explorations, combining postmodern with feminist theory.

Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 is an edited selection, published here for the first time, of the diaries kept by American poet and novelist Coleman during her years as an expatriate in the modernist hubs of France and England. During her time abroad, Coleman developed as a surrealist writer, publishing a novel, The Shutter of Snow, and poems in little magazines like transition. She also began her life’s work, her diary, which was sustained for over four decades. This portion of the diary is set against the cultural, social, and political milieu of the early twentieth century in the throes of industrialization, commercialization, and modernization. It showcases Coleman’s often larger-than-life, intense personality as she interacted with a multitude of literary, artistic, and intellectual figures of the period like Djuna Barnes, Peggy Guggenheim, Antonia White, John Holms, George Barker, Edwin Muir, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Waley, Humphrey Jennings, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot. The book offers Coleman’s lively, raw, and often iconoclastic account of her complex social network. The personal and professional encouragements, jealousies, and ambitions of her friends unfolded within a world of limitless sexual longing, supplies of alcohol, and aesthetic discussions. The diary documents the disparate ways Coleman celebrated, just as she consistently struggled to reconcile, her multiple identities as an artistic, intellectual, maternal, sexual, and spiritual woman. “Rough Draft” contributes to the growing modernist canon of life writings of both female and male participants whose autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries offer diverse accounts of the period, like Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together.