Modernist Women Dandies: Poetry, Photography, Authorship

Assessing the cultural history of the dandy as a figure traditionally gendered masculine, this wide-ranging study advances a critical space for the discussion of the woman dandy. Modernist Women Dandies revisits dandyism to provide an interpretative framework for re-evaluating the literary careers of women authors with atypical literary presence: Edith Sitwell, Nancy Cunard, and Mina Loy. Cutting across media boundaries, it demonstrates how their experimental poetry and portrait photographs feed into each other, fabricating dandy authorial performances that are simultaneously unapologetically feminine and queer. In showing how these authors redefined the interplay between dandyism and authorship, this book makes an important contribution to rethinking modernist literary culture.