Modernist Women’s Writing and the Gift of Literature

Abstract

In Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange, Rebecca Colesworthy shows how modernist women writers placed the concept of the gift at the center of their aesthetic projects and used it to interrogate the social possibilities of life under capitalist conditions. Countering widespread critical and theoretical tendencies to overlook women’s contributions to gift discourse and to essentialize generosity as an inherently “ feminine” gift, Colesworthy places literary studies and sociology in productive dialogue that achieves an effective balance between historicization and theoretical rigor. Throughout the book’s five chapters, she examines a diversity of texts, including novels, memoirs, and sociological treatises, with a particular focus on Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Gertrude Stein’s Ida A Novel, and H.D.’s The Gift.