“Twenty-First Century Feminist Modernisms” draws a through line from Virginia Woolf’s 1919 essay “Modern Novels” to the contributions of contemporary female authors to the genre. Scores of (male) writers and critics, from T. S. Eliot (1923) to Ortega y Gasset (1935) to Walter Benjamin (1930) to Will Self (2014), have been declaring the “death of the novel” for nearly a century. Even the founding of the Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, an award created to recognize books that “embody a spirit of innovation,” seems in part to offer a corrective to the state of contemporary fiction by rewarding novels that are impatient with convention (see Tristram Shandy). The tagline of the Goldsmiths Prize, “Fiction at its most novel,” seems simultaneously to enact a kind of aesthetic nostalgia while seeking to “offer resistance to the received idea of how a novel should be written.” This type of literary virtue-signaling that privileges the modernist ideal (breaking the rules of continuity, character, voice, and structure, among other conventions), is currently experiencing a resurgence—over a century after the modernist novel emerged, and half a century after it was supposedly superseded by postmodernism. That women’s lives are not new but are treated as novel is of central concern to contemporary literature, and this panel seeks to examine how the modernist novel is made contemporary through the presentation of women’s lives and feminist politics.

This panel contends that the persistent influence of modernist narratives on contemporary fiction opens up new questions about the relationship between modernism and the novel as a genre. The feminization of the protagonist that occurs in the novels of Jennine Capó Crucet, Ali Smith, Eimear McBride, Sally Rooney, Anna Burns, and many others belies the presence of modernism in the twenty-first century as a dynamic agent of disruptive change. Each panelist explores the recent upsurge in feminist modernist studies (as evidenced by the new journal of the same name) and seeks to map the legacies of modernist networks onto our contemporary moment, specifically in the context of contemporary feminist novels.

Considering the persistent influence of modernist narratives on contemporary fiction, Sarah Terry focuses on contemporary Irish fiction by women and/as the “neomodernist” novel. Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 for being “boldy original fiction,” even as it took nearly a decade for McBride to publish her “too experimental” novel. Similarly, Anna Burns’s 2018 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Milkman, has been categorized as “willfully demanding” in the stream-of-consciousness tradition of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Djuna Barnes. Sally Rooney, whose first two novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018; longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), have garnered critical acclaim, has been hailed as “the first great millennial novelist.” Frequently the immediate critical reception of these novels praises (or damns) their modernist heritage, a connection that, while true, fails to note that their aesthetic style works to present the unrelenting political, social, and sexual oppression of women. Yet the female narrators in these “difficult” novels, Terry argues, are made human precisely through their experimental narrative voices.

Amanda Golden examines Jennine Capó Crucet’s novel Make Your Home Among Strangers as a Joycean-influenced portrait of a first-generation college student. Choosing dashes over quotation marks, the author makes visible her allusion to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) in her Bildungsroman, Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015). In it, she charts the path of her first-generation Cuban American protagonist, Lizet Ramirez, at an elite liberal arts college. Crucet’s title indicates that her novel begins in the exile that Stephen Dedalus confronted at Portrait’s close. For Lizet, leaving home means the pursuit of intellectual passions, and ultimately a career in laboratory research. Further, Crucet pairs her protagonist’s story with that of Ariel Hernandez, a fictionalized version of Elian Gonzalez, the young boy who arrived in the United States from Cuba in 1999. As Lizet’s mother becomes a protestor, fighting for Ariel to stay in United States, Crucet speaks to the political stakes that can shape students’ sense of home in the twenty-first century.

We close with Emily James, who focuses on Scottish writer Ali Smith and her unfolding quartet of novels. Winter, the second installment, appeared in 2018 and reviewers quickly classified the novel as “Brexit lit” for its grim allusions to current political mayhem. But also timely are the feminist counterhistories embedded in the quartet, including little-known artists like Pauline Boty and Barbara Hepworth. In reading Winter, James considers the character Lux—a young woman, an immigrant, a lesbian—in light of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “I would venture to guess,” wrote Woolf in 1928, “that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Imaginative and witty, Lux is Anon’s descendant; she is Shakespeare’s sister in the Age of Brexit. And her opportunities are fewer and resources more tenuous than Woolf, or we, might have hoped. With no home or room of her own, Lux seeks shelter in London’s public libraries and soon finds herself evicted. James argues that Winter stages timely but familiar arguments about feminism, public space, and the politics of reading.

The presidential theme of this year’s conference, “Being Human,” invites us to consider the role of language and literature in defining what it is to be female/feminine/human. What are the implications of modernism in the age of #MeToo? How can feminist modernist studies help us consider contemporary fiction as that which combines the aesthetic and the political? Simon E. Gikandi’s statement challenges us to consider how literature has “been called upon to bear witness to both the possibility and limits of the human in the modern world.” This panel thinks about the relationship of texts and forms to gender, to community, and to the growing field of feminist modernisms.

This session will operate as a typical three-presenter format, with at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion with session attendees.