Daily Modernism
The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin
Description
Redrawing established boundaries between genres, Podnieks builds a broad critical and theoretical range on which she maps the diary as an aesthetic work, showing how diaries inscribe the aesthetics of literary modernisms. Drawing on feminist theory, literary history, biography, and personal anecdotes, she argues that the diary is an especially subversive space for women writers. Podnieks details how Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin wrote their diaries under the pretence that they were private, while always intending them to be published. She travelled extensively to examine the original diary manuscripts and offers unique first-hand descriptions of the manuscripts that underscore the artistic intentions of their authors. Daily Modernism contributes to the ongoing feminist revision of literary history and, in its disruption of traditional concepts of "major" and "minor" literary forms, paves the way for a much needed reconsideration of the diary as a valid literary achievement.
Reviews
"Daily Modernism refines and extends research on diary writing by explicating the literary aspects of diary making. It claims a place for diaries as public texts and begins to assert a female modernist tradition, anchoring that tradition in life writing." Helen M. Buss, Department of English, University of Calgary and author of Mapping Ourselves: Canadian Women's Autobiography "A most valuable contribution to the current debates in life writing circles. Podnieks' ability to synthesize traditions of criticism, current feminist and life writing theory and extant knowledge about the history and genre of the diary is most adroitly fashioned and also persuasively executed." Marlene Kadar, former director of the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies, York University