Bloomsbury Ordinary Matters: Modernist Women’s Literature and Photography

Ordinary Matters is the first major interdisciplinary study of the ordinary in modernist womens literature and photography. It examines how women photographers and writers including Helen Levitt, Lee Miller, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson envision the sphere of ordinary life in light of the social and cultural transformations of the period that shaped and often radically re-shaped it: for example, urbanism, instrumentalism, the Great Depression and war. Through a series of case studies that explore such topics as the street, domestic things, gesture and the face, Sim contends that the paradigmatic shifts that define early twentieth-century modernity not only inform modernist womens aesthetics of the everyday, but their artistic and ethical investments in that sphere. The everyday has been noted as a keynote of the New Modernist Studies (Todd Avery). Ordinary Matters comprises a vital contribution to recent scholarship on the topic and will be of value to scholars working in British and American modernism, multimedia modernisms, photography, twentieth-century literature, and critical and cultural histories of the everyday. Review Lorraine Sim proclaims her intense regard . . . for the ordinary. With a keen critical eye and a genuine commitment to the ethical complexities of everyday experience, in Virginia Woolf and the Patterns of Ordinary Experience Sim expanded and deepened our understanding of Woolf's infinite fascination with the ordinary and the familiar. Now in the beautifully written, richly illustrated Ordinary Matters, Sim broadens her scope while continuing to show why the ordinaryas a theoretical concept and as a collection of facts in the worldmattered to modernist writers and artists. In doing soand in deftly negotiating the subtle relations between existential facts and how modernist women writers and photographers think about and creatively explored themSim also reveals how our own lives, a hundred years since the beginning of the modernist era, stand to be enriched by a fuller awareness of ways that modernists explored their own ordinary lives and the ordinariness surrounding them and in which they moved. From street life to bodies and homely things, novels to essays and photographs, Sim shows how the ordinary matters in great part by continuing recent corrective efforts that reveal it as the glue connecting the broad categories of modernity, the everyday, and gender. In other words, Sim discovers in women's work---the writing of Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Dorothy Richardson, and the photography of Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Lee Miller, and Margaret Moncka much compelling evidence of the early- and mid-twentieth century's sustained preoccupation . . . with the terrain of the ordinary and daily. It is one thing to say that fascination with the ordinary and everyday represents a keynote of modernist literary and artistic activities; that is by now the most common of commonplaces. To understand the subtleties of these engagements, and why they matter ethically and politically, few critics offer as penetrating and graceful help as Sim. --Todd Avery, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USAIn Ordinary Matters Lorraine Sim consolidates her presence as a key figure in the field of modernist studies. This critically adept exploration of how the everyday figures in the work of modernist women writers and photographers establishes new terms for thinking about gender, modernity, modernism and the sphere of ordinary life. This is a substantial and novel intervention in both the theorization of the everyday and the gendering of modernism. --Maryanne Dever, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Technology Sydney, AustraliaThis innovative and compelling work challenges the field of everyday life studies by taking gender fully into account. Many of the fields presuppositions about the alienating experiences of modern life are overturned by