Ann L. Ardis Professor of English and
Associate Dean
Ann Ardis (B.A. University of Kansas, 1979; M.A., Ph.D. University of Virginia, 1988) has published extensively on turn-of-the-twentieth-century British literature and culture. The common thread running through all of her major research projects to date has been an interest in the relationship between recorded history and silence as well in what Raymond Williams has termed the “machinery of selective tradition.”
Her first book, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (Rutgers, 1990), on representations of the “New Woman” in British fiction and the popular press, considered how and why these immensely popular (and controversial) narratives were moved to the margins of the historical record as modernism came to be seen as the aesthetic of modernity. Her second book, Modernism and Cultural Conflict: 1880-1922 (Cambridge, 2002) focused more broadly on a variety of changes in the public sphere related to the “rise” of literary modernism: e.g., the consolidation of modern disciplinary distinctions, the emergence and decline of film and music hall theatre, and the debates about literature’s role in culture generated by socialism and feminism. The anthology she co-edited with Leslie Lewis, Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945 (Johns Hopkins, 2002), also works across and between disciplinary and high/low culture divides. While it includes essays on women’s efforts to negotiate the literary marketplace, most of the volume’s contributors work with a far broader palate of cultural texts—periodical press journalism, political pamphlets, sexual advice manuals, gynecology textbooks, psychological treatises. With Bonnie Kime Scott, she is also co-editor of Virginia Woolf Turning the Centuries (Pace, 2002).
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