ABSTRACT Historically, women artists were dismissed under the male gaze, restricted to “feminine” subjects and mediums, and denied critical recognition. This essay examines the evolution of the female gaze in American watercolor still life through the careers of three women artists: Claude Raguet Hirst (1855–1942), Phyllis Sloane (1921–2009), and Idelle Weber (1932–2020). Through attention to everyday objects and strategic modernist visual choices, this essay argues that Hirst, Sloane, and Weber advanced a feminist agenda, reclaiming and reinterpreting the gaze within a dismissed and undervalued medium. Their work transforms the ordinary into a site of personal expression, while also rendering women’s artistic labor visible, showing that women’s artistic contributions were never secondary but deliberately subversive. This study situates their contributions within broader feminist and art historical discourse, challenging entrenched gender biases and demonstrating how the female gaze operates not as a reversal of the male gaze but as a representation of lived experience.

ABSTRACT Colette’s Le Pur et l’Impur (The Pure and the Impure) chronicles the erotic lives of a series of fin-de-siècle historical figures, each an acquaintance, friend, or one-time lover whose sexual and gender expressions are articulated within various social undergrounds. In this work, which marks a milestone in the portrayal of female and lesbian sexuality, Colette writes the erotic lives and varied subjectivities of women, lesbians, and other-gendered figures, providing an erotic vocabulary that allows for an embodied experience irreducible to any fixed subject position, identity, or extrinsic real. Alienated from normative assignations of sex, gender, and desire, this essay argues that the exiled and melancholic states of Colette’s personae provide the conditions of their sensual self-articulation, the liminal spaces they occupy matched by spectral bodies that shift physical form and even temporalities. In this narrative, which itself defies genre, desire traverses environments, time, and bodies whose plasticity and otherness form the grounds of all experience that Colette names “pure.”

ABSTRACT Short introduction to Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) cluster for FMS Spring 2026.

ABSTRACT The inkblot left its mark on the creative unconscious of twentieth-century artists and writers. Yet despite the blot’s gothic style, pareidolic tendencies, and prevalence of bestial imagery, the appearance of inkblots remains surprisingly rare in surrealist practice. “Imaginary Entomology” recovers an avant-garde history of the inkblot in Gisèle Prassinos’ unexplored short stories and drawings. Writing in 1930s Paris, she expanded the inkblot from a parlor game and psychological diagnostic to a key surrealist form of artmaking. Insects and illusory appendages persistently spilled from her inkbottle, enabling her to design spectral abstractions that challenge conventional surrealist hierarchies (predator versus prey) and authorial technique (automatism versus agency). Indeed, in her inkblots, Prassinos explores the relationship between invisible creatures and fantastic femme-enfant figures – both of which, like the inkblots themselves, remain marginal. Drawing on a large body of unpublished work held at the Historical Library of the City of Paris, this article argues that her life-long preoccupation with various blotting techniques is central to her distinctive entomological aesthetic. Prassinos’ absurdist vignettes and anti-fairy tales ultimately offer an “imaginary entomology” – to borrow her own phrasing – where avant-garde arthropods inspirit the unexpected, threatening the world of logic and the very existence of all life.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the Hogarth Essays (1923–26; 1926–28), analyzing them as a networked, years-long and polyvocal conversation about Bloomsbury aesthetics and politics. The Hogarth Essays was arguably the most successful of the Hogarth Press’s eponymous series of pamphlet-length publications. Individual essays have been the subject of much critical attention, some to a greater extent than others. However, there is little critical work to date that investigates the essays as a whole. This essay proposes to model various approaches to the Hogarth Essays that emphasize their networked and interrelated natures. The first set is book-historical: using resources from MAPP, from the University of Reading’s Archive of British Publishers, and from the personal writings of Hogarth Essays authors, I trace the ways in which the Hogarth Essays and their authors use the pamphlets to conduct conversations about aesthetics. The second set of approaches is analytical. I use topic modeling approaches to read across the pamphlets, creating data maps that visualize each pamphlet’s relationship with the others. This approach enables me not only to trace relations across the corpus as a whole but to identify and map more implicit sites of mirroring, echoing and repetition across the Essays. I end this article by arguing that a combination of analytical and book-historical methodologies can provide a framework for further large-scale investigations of small press culture.

ABSTRACT Studies centred on questions of generationality, periodization, and ageing have flourished in modernist scholarship in recent years. In a conversation reflecting on this work, Sarah Parker and Jade French discuss how their recent monographs seek to address similar questions of how periodization, ageing, and generational thinking shape our understanding of modernism and literary form, including who is – and who isn't – included or considered in this category of “modernist studies”.