The grammar of self-creation: Feminism, modernism, and the linguistic ontology of Dora Marsden

This dissertation recuperates the life and work of Dora Marsden (1882-1960), who was the editor and founder of three influential journals published sequentially from 1911 to 1919, The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist, and demonstrates the importance of Marsden's writing in the histories of feminism and early Anglo-American literary modernism. To appreciate Marsden's work, it is necessary to view it apart from the distorting lens of later negative critical assessments. By closely examining Marsden's work, archival documents, and reviews from the time of its composition, we gain an important understanding of its significance in its own historical moment.; The few literary critics who know of Marsden at all know of her as an editor who was responsible for bringing into print the early work of numerous writers who now are regarded as key figures in literary modernism, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Wyndham Lewis, and William Carlos Williams, among many others. Yet even where her editorial role is concerned, most critics have underrated Marsden's importance by arguing that she had only a negligible influence on the literary content of her journals. Archival evidence demonstrates that Marsden was a potent editorial force and that her own written work often set the standard for the work of her contributors.; This project demonstrates that Marsden was more than a conduit for literary modernism. She was a progenitor of it. In addition to editing her journals, Marsden was also the primary contributor to them, formulating, in nine years of serial publication, a coherent body of work that centers around issues of individualism, or what Marsden called a "philosophy of egoism." By locating in Marsden's work a provocative nexus of linguistic and ontological concerns, it becomes apparent that her work predated many of the views and linguistic strategies of the modernists who followed her. In recuperating Marsden, then, we recuperate not just an important influence on literary modernism, but a lost literary modernist as well. Furthermore, when we appreciate the importance of feminism to her modernist writing, we may begin to appreciate the general role feminism played in shaping literary modernism.