Ann L. Ardis
Professor of English
Associate Dean, Arts and Humanities
College of Arts and Sciences
4 Kent Way, Room 101
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
(302) 831-2793
aardis@udel.edu
Ann Ardis (B.A. University of Kansas; M.A., Ph.D. University of Virginia) has published extensively on turn-of-the-twentieth century British literature and culture. She has served since 2002 as Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities and currently serves on the advisory board of the Modernist Journals Project and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She has also served as Program Chair for the Modernist Studies Association (2003-05), Director of the University Honors Program (1998-2002), and Director of Graduate Studies in English (1994-98).
The common thread running through all of her major research projects to date has been an interest in both the relationship between recorded history and silence and in what Raymond Williams has termed the “machinery of selective tradition.” Her first book, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 1990), on representations of the “New Woman” in British fiction and the popular press at the end of nineteenth century, considered how and why these wildly popular, and controversial, narratives were moved to the margins of the historical record as the aesthetic of high modernism came to be seen as the aesthetic of modernity. Her recent book, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922 (Cambridge University Press, 2002; paperback 2008), focused more broadly on a variety of changes in the public sphere at the turn of the twentieth century that bear upon the “rise” of literary modernism: the consolidation of modern disciplinary distinctions, the emergence and decline of new and residual aesthetic forms such as film and music hall theatre, and the debates about literature’s role in culture generated by turn-of-the-century British socialists and feminists. The anthology she co-edited with Leslie Lewis, Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945 (Johns Hopkins University, 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 broader palate of cultural texts—periodical press journalism, political pamphlets, sexual advice manuals, gynecology textbooks, psychological treatises. What both of these recent projects share with earlier projects is an interest in recovering other stories, the histories we’ve neglected to remember about the turn of the twentieth century because the vaunted “difficulty” and aesthetics of modernism (even in its recently pluralized formulations) have been so successfully naturalized.
With support from the Center for Material Culture Studies, Ardis organized a symposium at the University of Delaware on “Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms” in April 2007. This symposium has resulted in the publication of a co-edited volume by the same title (Palgrave 2008) that features work by literary scholars and media historians on the visual, technological, and editorial “mediamorphosis” of print media at the turn of the twentieth century.
Professor Ardis’s current book project, tentatively entitled “Engaging Modernity: Magazines, Modernism, and the Transatlantic Public Sphere,” is about British and American magazines at the turn of the twentieth century that sought to engage an increasingly diverse and newly literate public in discussions of "modern" literature, art, and politics. With Pat Collier, she is also beginning to plan a second symposium on transatlantic print culture.
BOOKS:
ANTHOLOGY:
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940. Co-edited with Patrick Collier. (Palgrave, 2008).
BOOK:
Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922.(Cambridge University Press, 2002; reprinted in paper, 2008).
ANTHOLOGY:
Women’s ‘Experience’ of Modernity, 1875-1945. Co-edited with Leslie Lewis. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
ANTHOLOGY:
Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries. Selected Papers from the Ninth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Co-edited with Bonnie Kime Scott. (Pace University Press, 2000).
BOOK
New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism,
(New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
ESSAYS AND BOOK CHAPTERS:
“T. S. Eliot and Something Called ‘Modernism.’” A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. David Chinitz. Forthcoming, Blackwell, 2009.
“Modernism and Democracy: A. R. Orage and The New Age (1908-1922).” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Ed. Andrew Thacker and Peter Brooker. Forthcoming, Oxford University Press. 2009.
“The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age.” Modernism/Modernity 14.3 (Fall 2007): 407-34.
“Landscape for a New Woman.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. 3.2 (Summer 2007). August 26, 2007.
with Teresa Mangum and Sally Mitchell. “The New Woman’s Work: Past, Present, and Future.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. 3.2 (Summer 2007). August 26, 2007.
“E. M. Forster and Italy,” The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, ed. David Bradshaw (Cambridge University Press, 2006). 62-77.
“Debating Feminism, Modernism, Socialism: Beatrice Hastings’ Voices in The New Age,” in The Gender Complex of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (University of Illinois Press, 2006). 160-85.
“The Gender of Modernity,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 61-83.
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