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Abstract

In this dissertation, I situate my study in the writings of American and British women in the twentieth century, arguing that, in the development and aftermaths of the stylistic and print practices of transatlantic literary modernisms, one can trace the development of a queer feminist identity and lineage. I base my work on critical excavations of queer modernisms that have occurred over the last thirty years and, specifically, recent re-evaluations of earlier, more circumscribed treatments on the intertwined developments of modernist stylistics and non-normative identity. Moving from this, I use a series of case studies to sketch both the influence of sapphic writing on the development of modernism and the ways in which sapphic modernism, in its stylistic markers, its histories and figures, and its harnessing of specific print and publishing tactics, served as a constructing influence on later-century formations of identity and community. The case studies I employ are deeply personal and individuated: They reflect the specific desires and impulses of their originators and, thus, speak to situated perspectives within a particular time and place. However, each case depends upon a dedication to stylistic homage and thematic citation, a practice in which the high stakes of intergenerational connection and conversation are always at play. Though effectively expanding and exceeding the twentieth century, the tactics and motivations that bring together such temporally, generically diverse authors as Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Renée Vivien, H.D., Nella Larsen, Danzy Senna, Djuna Barnes, and Bertha Harris are strikingly similar. Together, they paint a convincing portrait of both the utopian promise—and the more realistic vagaries—of a coherent, transatlantic, queer literary kinship between women writers in the twentieth century.