Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism [Hardcover]

This text analyzes the legal, social and literary impact of lesbian scandal on early twentieth-century British and Anglo-American culture.By reconsidering notions of the invisible or apparitional lesbian in early twentieth-century culture, Jodie Medd reveals how modern political, legal, artistic, and literary communities negotiated their own identities, ideals, and limits in relation to lesbian scandal. Medd's text will appeal especially to scholars and graduate students in gender and women's studies, modernist literary studies, and British and American literature.By reconsidering notions of the invisible or apparitional lesbian in early twentieth-century culture, Jodie Medd reveals how modern political, legal, artistic, and literary communities negotiated their own identities, ideals, and limits in relation to lesbian scandal. Medd's text will appeal especially to scholars and graduate students in gender and women's studies, modernist literary studies, and British and American literature.Before lesbianism became a specific identity category in the West, its mere suggestion functioned as a powerful source of scandal in early twentieth-century British and Anglo-American culture. Reconsidering notions of the invisible or apparitional lesbian, Jodie Medd argues that lesbianism's representational instability, and the scandals it generated, rendered it an influential force within modern politics, law, art, and the literature of modernist writers like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf. Medd's analysis draws on legal proceedings and parliamentary debates as well as crises within modern literary production  patronage relations, literary obscenity, and cultural authority  to reveal how lesbian suggestion forced modern political, cultural, and literary institutions to negotiate their own identities, ideals, and limits. Medd's text will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students in gender and women's studies, modernist literary studies, and l#R