Overview

"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."

Full Product Details

9780192857835

Table of Contents

Reviews

"A ""brilliantly original exploration of craftwork and archives"": Elkins reads lines of stitching as carefully and imaginatively as she reads lines of text... The book itself is a remarkable object by the standards of academic publishing. * Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf Miscellany * Elkins demonstrates that collage and patchwork's specific ability to draw various elements together - like the intersections of different aspects of identity - allows for differences to exist in complex unity in craft just as they do within people. Therefore, through an attention to the medium specificities of their processes, Elkins brilliantly establishes that collage and patchwork are formally intersectional media that resist reductive arguments around identity. [...] Elkins makes a compelling and creative contribution and, following Crafting Feminism's project 'to loosen the binding of the academic monograph', perhaps we too shall find new ways of working to re-ink, re-print, re-collage, and re-stitch feminist research. * Alice Dodds, The Courtauld * For too long, 'craft' has been denigrated as the lowbrow cousin of 'art'-- something unserious, a hobby, perhaps because often practiced by women...But scholarship, galleries, and museums are taking craft as seriously as 'high art.' Amy E. Elkins's masterful Crafting Feminism brings this attitude to literary studies, offering not just a study of how craft matters to modernism and feminist art but also a methodology for studying art, craft, literature, and their intersections...Elkins explicitly draws on her 'persistent sense of wonder' together with an eagerness to 'tap into sources of joy as valid intellectual responses'--approaches that for far too long were shunned from academic work. * Catherine E. Paul, Woolf Studies Annual *"

"A ""brilliantly original exploration of craftwork and archives"": Elkins reads lines of stitching as carefully and imaginatively as she reads lines of text... The book itself is a remarkable object by the standards of academic publishing. * Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf Miscellany *"

"A ""brilliantly original exploration of craftwork and archives"": Elkins reads lines of stitching as carefully and imaginatively as she reads lines of text... The book itself is a remarkable object by the standards of academic publishing. * Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf Miscellany * Elkins demonstrates that collage and patchwork's specific ability to draw various elements together - like the intersections of different aspects of identity - allows for differences to exist in complex unity in craft just as they do within people. Therefore, through an attention to the medium specificities of their processes, Elkins brilliantly establishes that collage and patchwork are formally intersectional media that resist reductive arguments around identity. [...] Elkins makes a compelling and creative contribution and, following Crafting Feminism's project 'to loosen the binding of the academic monograph', perhaps we too shall find new ways of working to re-ink, re-print, re-collage, and re-stitch feminist research. * Alice Dodds, The Courtauld *"

Author Information

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.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available