Elizabeth F. Evans

Bio: Elizabeth F. Evans is an academic researcher from University of Notre Dame. The author has contributed to research in topics: Cultural history & Literary criticism. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 6 publications receiving 38 citations.

Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London

Abstract: Threshold Modernism reveals how changing ideas about gender and race in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain shaped - and were shaped by - London and its literature. Chapters address key sites, especially department stores, women's clubs, and city streets, that coevolved with controversial types of modern women. Interweaving cultural history, narrative theory, close reading, and spatial analysis, Threshold Modernism considers canonical figures such as George Gissing, Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf alongside understudied British and colonial writers including Amy Levy, B. M. Malabari, A. B. C. Merriman-Labor, Duse Mohamed Ali, and Una Marson. Evans argues that these diverse authors employed the 'new public women' and their associated spaces to grapple with widespread cultural change and reflect on the struggle to describe new subjects, experiences, and ways of seeing in appropriately novel ways. For colonial writers of color, those women and spaces provided a means through which to claim their own places in imperial London.

Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940

Abstract: Among the most pressing problems in modernist literary studies are those re-lated to Britain’s engagement with the wider world under empire and to its ownrapidly evolving urban spaces in the years before the Second World War. In both cases, the literary-geographic imagination—or unconscious—of the periodbetween 1880 and 1940 can help to shed light on how texts by British and British-aligned writers of the era understood these issues and how they evolved over time.

Air War, Propaganda, and Woolf's Anti-Tyranny Aesthetic

Abstract: This essay examines Virginia Woolf’s negotiation of political and aesthetic commitments in the 1930s, reassessing her revisions of The Years away from explicit political critique in the context of the Woolfs’ trip to Germany, the release of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will , and the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Tracing a homology between a literal aerial perspective, a totalizing narrative voice, political propaganda, and despotism, this essay argues that Woolf embedded her critique of tyranny within the novel’s form. With two narrative perspectives, the novel undercuts the allure of totalizing knowledge without itself propagandizing.

‘Counter-jumpers’ and ‘Queens of the Street’: The Shop Girl of Gissing and his Contemporaries

Abstract: In Gissing’s London, women employed in shops had a variety of names: ‘women in business,’ ‘queens of the street,’ ‘counter-jumpers,’ and, most commonly, ‘shop girls.’ This constellation of names indicates the range of responses the female shop assistant elicited, and also points to a number of anxieties that surrounded her and her place of employment.1 At once a victim of commercialism and an aspiring social climber, the woman behind the counter was associated variously with the New Woman, the slave worker, the prostitute, and the modern commerce itself. As Sally Ledger has convincingly argued in her essay on Gissing’s The Odd Women, it was the shop girl rather than the New Woman that was the more problematic figure of modern urban life. I build upon Ledger’s recognition that the shop girl was a figure of fascination and discomfort for both Gissing and his contemporaries by reading Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and In the Year of Jubilee (1894) side by side with contemporary discourse about the shop girl in the periodical press. This comparative reading not only confirms that Gissing’s conflicted attitudes toward these emblems of modernity were shared by his contemporaries, but also suggests his use of a prevalent narrative: the shop girl, who may be morally tainted by her exposure to the public sphere, will marry perhaps into a higher social circle, and is liable to corrupt the sanctity of the private sphere.

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization.

Abstract: Introduction - body and city: the passive body the plan of the book a personal note. Part 1 Powers of the voice and eye: nakedness - the citizen's body in Perikles' Athens the cloak of darkness - the protections of ritual in Athens the obsessive image - place and time in Hadrian's Rome time in the body - early Christians in Rome. Part 2 Movements of the heart: comunity - the Paris of Jehan de Chelles \"each man is a devil to himself\" - the paris of Humbert de Romans fear of touching - the Jewish ghetto in Renaissance Venice. Part 3 Arteries and veins: moving bodies - Harvey's revolution the body set free - Boullee's Paris urban individualism - E.M. Forster's London. Conclusion: civic bodies - multi-cultural New York.

Geography Lessons@@@Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter

Abstract: List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Locational Feminism3Pt. IFeminism/Multiculturalism15Ch. 1\"Beyond\" Gender: The New Geography of Identity and the Future of Feminist Criticism17Ch. 2\"Beyond\" White and Other: Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse36Ch. 3\"Beyond\" Difference: Migratory Feminism in the Borderlands67Pt. IIFeminism/Globalism105Ch. 4Geopolitical Literacy: Internationalizing Feminism at \"Home\" - The Case of Virginia Woolf107Ch. 5Telling Contacts: Intercultural Encounters and Narrative Poetics in the Borderlands between Literary Studies and Anthropology132Ch. 6\"Routes/Roots\": Boundaries, Borderlands, and Geopolitical Narratives of Identity151Pt. IIIFeminism/Poststructuralism179Ch. 7Negotiating the Transatlantic Divide: Feminism after Poststructuralism181Ch. 8Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative, and Desire199Ch. 9Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Feminist Theory and Poetic Practice228Notes243References281Index303