Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present

Crafting Feminism develops a dynamic study of craft and art-making in modern and contemporary feminist writing. In evocative readings of literary works from Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith, this book expands our sense of transartistic modernist scholarship to encompass process-oriented and medium-specific analyses of textile arts, digital design, collage, photography, painting, and sculpture in literary culture. By integrating these craft practices into the book's enlightening archive, Elkins's theoretical argument extends a reading of craft metaphors into the material present. Crafting Feminism demonstrates how writers have engaged with handiwork across generations and have undertaken the crafting of a new modernity, one that is queer and feminist-threaded, messy, shattered, cut-up, pasted together, preserved, repaired, reflected, and spun out. An avant-garde work of scholarship, this book interweaves queer research methods and interdisciplinary rigor with a series of surprising archival discoveries. Making visible the collaborative, creative features of craft, Elkins captivates readers with generous illustrations and a series of "Techne" interchapters-interludes between longer chapters, which powerfully convey the symbiosis between feminist theory and method, and detail the network of archival influences that underpin this volume's hybrid approach. Foregrounding the work of decentering patriarchal and Eurocentric legacies of artistic authority, Elkins champions the diverse, intergenerational history of craft as a way to reposition intersectional makers at the heart of literary culture. An original and compelling study, Crafting Feminism breaks new ground in modernist and visual studies, digital humanities, and feminist, queer, and critical race theory.

Amy E. Elkins is Associate Professor of English at Macalester College. She has published in such places as PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Modernism/modernity, and Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to her academic work and teaching, Elkins is a multimedia artist and studies practice-based research in the humanities.

- List of figures - Introduction: The Weaver's Handshake - EMTechne I: Broken Things - Chapter One: Shattered Craft - EMTechne II: Passed Down - Chapter Two: Needlecraft Feminism - EMTechne III: Inky Depths - Chapter Three: The Poetics of Pigment - EMTechne IV: Patch Work - Chapter Four: Collage and Queer Embodiment - EMTechne V: Digital Turns - Coda: Handmaking the Digital - EMTechne VI: Common Threads