Susan Stanford Friedman

Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study. Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aime Cesaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Negritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.

Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study. Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aime Cesaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Negritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.

Penelope's Web should appeal to a wide spectrum of readers interested in twentieth-century modernism, women's writing, feminist criticism, post-structuralist theory, psychoanalysis, autobiography, and women's studies. Published in 1991, it was the first book to examine fully the brilliantly innovative prose writings of H. D., the pen-name for Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who has been known primarily as a poet. Her prose, more personal, experimental, and postmodern than her poetry, raises central questions about the relation of women writers to language, desire and history. She suppressed in her lifetime many of these texts because of their daring exploration of her bisexuality and their radical critique of the social order. H. D.'s prose writings contribute importantly to the many histories and theories of modernism that are redrawing boundaries to include the achievement of women writers.

In this powerful work, Susan Friedman moves feminist theory out of paralyzing debates about us and them, white and other, first and third world, and victimizers and victims. Throughout, Friedman adapts current cultural theory from global and transnational studies, anthropology, and geography to challenge modes of thought that exaggerate the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and national origin. The author promotes a transnational and heterogeneous feminism, which, she maintains, can replace the proliferation of feminisms based on difference. She argues for a feminist geopolitical literacy that goes beyond fundamentalist identity politics and absolutist poststructuralist theory, and she continually focuses the reader's attention on those locations where differences are negotiated and transformed. Pervading the book is a concern with narrative: the way stories and cultural narratives serve as a primary mode of thinking about the politically explosive question of identity. Drawing freely on modernist novels, contemporary film, popular fiction, poetry, and mass media, the work features narratives of such writers and filmmakers as Gish Jen, Julie Dash, June Jordon, James Joyce, Gloria Anzald%a, Neil Jordon, Virginia Woolf, Mira Nair, Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, and Irena Klepfisz. Defending the pioneering role of academic feminists in the knowledge revolution, this work draws on a wide variety of twentieth-century cultural expressions to address theoretical issues in postmodern feminism.

Penelope's Web should appeal to a wide spectrum of readers interested in twentieth-century modernism, women's writing, feminist criticism, post-structuralist theory, psychoanalysis, autobiography, and women's studies. Published in 1991, it was the first book to examine fully the brilliantly innovative prose writings of H. D., the pen-name for Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who has been known primarily as a poet. Her prose, more personal, experimental, and postmodern than her poetry, raises central questions about the relation of women writers to language, desire and history. She suppressed in her lifetime many of these texts because of their daring exploration of her bisexuality and their radical critique of the social order. H. D.'s prose writings contribute importantly to the many histories and theories of modernism that are redrawing boundaries to include the achievement of women writers.

" . . . a major study of the poetry." —Sandra M. Gilbert, New York Times Book Review " . . . the first book-length study to approach H.D. from a feminist perspective. . . . Psyche Reborn is a valuable book not only for H.D. specialists but also for those interested in twentieth-century intellectual history." —Cheryl Walker, Signs " . . . lucid, deeply informed assessment . . . " —Joanne Felt Diehl, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature "Indiana University Press should be heartily commended for promoting Psyche Reborn in paperback, hence making this vital critical work more widely available." —Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter " . . . a richly documented, polemical, and intelligent study . . . Friedman's is a splendid and rewarding achievement." —The Year's Work in English Studies