Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson(16 Writing About Women Feminist Literary Studies)

Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, a thirteen volume epic novel, was one of the first turn-of-the-century 'experiments' in the stream-of-consciousness. Richardson was a contemporary of Proust, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, who referred to herself as an 'intermittent student' of Richardson's. Richardson also wrote about the early silent cinema for the journal Close Up, published by H.D. Bryher and Macpherson. In her writings on the film, as well as in her novel writing, Richardson explores what she sees as a direct connection between issues of gender and the necessity for formal literary innovation. This book investigates the way in which Richardson's focus on these issues required that she invent new theories of reading and viewing practices, and a new profile for the page of the novel - punctuated and composed as never before.

About the Author :
The Author: Susan Gevirtz is an assistant professor of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University. She received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. In addition to critical work and poetry published widely in professional journals, she was an associate editor on HOW(ever), a journal for poets and scholars, and is author of four books of poetry: Linen minus, Domino: Point of Entry, Taken Place, and Prosthesis:Caesarea.

Review :
'Narrative's Journey' combines original research with finely balanced readings to give an account of Dorothy Richardson's fiction and film writing that makes an important contribution both to the study of Richardson, and more generally to our understanding of women and modernism in Britain in the first decades of the century. That it is excitingly written, rigorously and deftly exploratory, is an essential part of its response to Richardson's work and of the feminist poetics it exemplifies. (Stephen Heath, Jesus College Cambridge, England) 'Narrative's Journey' is a genuinely original study of a major modernist who has been as neglected by contemporary feminists as she has been overlooked by film theorists and literary critics. Refusing the synthesizer's familiar role, Susan Gevirtz has written a book that, like Richardson's own writing, defies simple categorizations. Self-reflective and empathic, as well as critically sophisticated and theoretically informed. Gevirtz puts the pathbreaking novel 'Pilgrimage' into conversation with Richardson's essays on the early silent cinema, enabling each to illuminate and interrogate the other, defining an aesthetic theory and practice which is modernist and feminist. An accomplished poet, Gevirtz writes with eloquence and wisdom of the illuminating encounter with this brilliant and eccentric writer which is her own narrative journey. (Helene Moglen, UC, Santa Cruz)