Overview

Scholarship in modernist literary and cultural studies tends to privilege urban spaces while excluding rural regions from mappings of world literature. Regional writing has been both effeminized as a genre and seen as contrary to the transnational nature of modernism, leaving little consideration for the role of the countryside in modernity.

My previous research project broadens the spatial scope of modernist studies by showing how the countryside functioned as a place for women authors in peripheral locations of the world to both critique the uneven development of modernity as well as to provide alternative visions of future communities. I examine how the countryside and its communities became imagined in American and Nordic modernist literary texts written by and about linguistic and ethnic minorities in the first half of the twentieth century. I study the works of authors such as Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Hagar Olsson, and Marja-Liisa Vartio, and as I engage with their writings, I draw from the fields of feminist regionalism, transnational modernist studies, and narrative theory.