Gift Subscriptions: Underwriting Emergent Agencies in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth

This article explores the Modernist life narrative in the context of interwar citizenship policies that exposed women to an increased risk of statelessness on both sides of the Atlantic. Read together, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) bring this tran...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inModern fiction studies Vol. 59; no. 3; pp. 569 - 590
Main Author Im, Jeannie
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2013
Subjects
British & Irish literature
Citizenship
Cosmopolitanism
Daughters
English literature
Literary criticism
Modernism
Novels
Smedley, Agnes
Sovereignty
Verbal aggression
War
Women
Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)
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Summary:This article explores the Modernist life narrative in the context of interwar citizenship policies that exposed women to an increased risk of statelessness on both sides of the Atlantic. Read together, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) bring this transnational context into view. While access to rights may indicate the ideal endpoint of subject-formation in the traditional Bildungsroman , Woolf and Smedley demonstrate how women’s access to rights comes at the cost of nonnormative desire. Their works use a rhetoric of incivility to mark emergent agencies within and alongside formal structures of citizenship.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:0026-7724
1080-658X
1080-658X
DOI:10.1353/mfs.2013.0036