Modernism, Feminism and the Culture of Boredom

Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. Whether in popular offerings such as Robert Hitchens's The Garden of Allah, the esteemed middlebrow novels of May Sinclair or H. G. Wells, or now-canonized works such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, women's boredom frequently serves as narrative impetus, antagonist and climax. In this book, Allison Pease explains how the changing meaning of boredom reshapes our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, feminism's struggle to define women as individuals and male modernists' preoccupation with female sexuality. To this end, Pease characterizes boredom as an important category of critique against the constraints of women's lives, arguing that such critique surfaces in modernist fiction in an undeniably gendered way. Engaging with a wide variety of well- and lesser-known modernist writers, Pease's study will appeal especially to researchers and graduates in modernist studies and British literature.

Preface; 1. Boredom and bored women in the early twentieth century; 2. Overcoming nihilism: male-authored female boredom; 3. May Sinclair, feminism, and boredom; 4. Boredom as social system in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage; 5. Boredom and individualism in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out; Conclusion; Bibliography.

Allison Pease is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY, where she also serves as Chair of the English department. She is author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000) and has published widely in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, Criticism, The Journal of Gender Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature. She received her MA and PhD in English Literature from New York University.