New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880-1930 (Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature, 1)

New Woman Hybridities explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the turn-of-the-century New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks. Individual chapters by international scholars scrutinize the flow of ideas, images and textual parameters of New Woman discourses in the UK, North America, Europe, and Japan, elucidating the national and ethnic hybridity of the 'modern woman' by locating this figure within both international consumer culture and feminist writing.

Since the 1970s, the literary and cultural politics of the turn-of-the-century New Woman have received increasing academic attention. Whether she is seen as the emblem of sexual anarchy, an agent of mediation between mass market and modernist cultures, or as a symptom of the consolidation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century political liberation movements, the New Woman represents a site of cultural and socio-political contestation and acts as a marker of modernity. This book explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks including the UK, Canada, North America, Europe, and Japan. The key concept of 'hybridities' is used to elucidate the national and ethnic multiplicity of the 'modern woman' as well as to locate this figure both within international consumer culture and within feminist writing.

The book is structured around four key themes. 'Hybridities' examines the instabilities of New Woman identities and discourses in relation to both national/ethnic contexts and the textual parameters of New Woman writings. 'Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass' is concerned with the periodical press and its production and circulation of New Woman images. 'Feminist Counter Cultures?' interrogates feminist efforts to influence and shape this process by mimicking or subverting dominant models of representation and by establishing alternative spaces for the articulation of New Woman subjectivities. 'Race and the New Woman' inspects white New Women's investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the way in which black and non-Western women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debate. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of American Studies, Women's Studies, and Women's History.

Book Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Contents......Page 5 List of figures......Page 11 Notes on the contributors......Page 13 Acknowledgements......Page 17 Introduction......Page 18 Hybridities......Page 32 Bertha Thomas: the New Woman and 'Anglo-Welsh' hybridity......Page 34 A Hungarian New Woman writer and a hybrid autobiographical subject: Margit Kaffka's 'Lyrical Notes of a Year'......Page 52 Through the (periodical) looking glass......Page 66 Writing women's history: 'the sex' debates of 1889......Page 68 The American New Woman and her influence on the Daughters of the Empire of British Columbia in the daily press (1880 95)......Page 91 Locating the flapper in rural Irish society: the Irish provincial press and the modern woman in the 1920s......Page 107 Subverting the flapper: the unlikely alliance of Irish popular and ecclesiastical press in the 1920s......Page 119 Riding the tiger: ambivalent images of the New Woman in the popular press of the Weimar Republic......Page 135 Communities of women......Page 160 Romance, glamour and the exotic: femininity and fashion in Britain in the 1900s......Page 162 Charged with ambiguity: the image of the New Woman in American cartoons......Page 175 The day of the girl: Nell Brinkley and the New Woman......Page 196 'The woman of the twentieth century': the feminist vision and its reception in the Hungarian press 1904 14......Page 207 The New Woman in Japan: radicalism and ambivalence towards love and sex......Page 222 Race and the New Woman......Page 238 'Natural' divisions/national divisions: whiteness and the American New Woman in the General Federation of Women's Clubs......Page 240 The birth of national hygiene and efficiency: women and eugenics in Britain and America 1865 1915......Page 257 Index......Page 280 "This book will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of American Studies, Women's Studies and Women's History."--BOOK JACKET