One of the least contestable features of postmodernism is its refusal to accept the hierarchy of value and élitism implied in the d istinction between high culture and popular culture. In the genealogies frequently circulated , postmodernism is pictured in opposition to two versions of modernism: a modernism codified and conquered by the academy and museum, incorporated as a high cultural artef...

For past millennia, midwives have served women in childbirth. In premodern times, midwives were usually the only birth attendants. With the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of modernism, male physicians either replaced midwives or superceded them in the modernist medical hierarchy, leaving them with plenty of women to attend but with relatively little autonomy. As the new millennium dawns ...

Pericles Lewis, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, is the author of Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He is currently working on two projects, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism and a book on religious experience in the modernist novel, from which the essay in this issue is drawn. Churchgoing in the Modern N...

he therapies of Rivers and Yealland represented the two modes of English psychiatric modernism which would affect women both inside and outside the asylum from the 1920s to the 1960s: psychoanalysis, which offered the twentieth century's most influential theory of femininity and female sexuality; and traditional medical psychiatry, which made rapid advances in scientific knowledge and technolog...

eorge Eliot’s legacy for modernism is worth considering on multiple grounds but especially in the context of religious belief and its influence on social morality. The comments of two early twentieth-century writers are suggestive of the mixed nature of her legacy. On the one hand, novelist Virginia Woolf (among the most strident critics of Victorian culture) famously said of Middle-march (1872...

Katherine Mansfield is traditionally located in English Modernism; however, she goes beyond the modernist perception of the “allotropic self” and approaches the endlessly split subject of postmodernism. This study selects the theoretical rationale of a number of postmodernist critics that validates a perception of Mansfield’s treatment of the human subject as postmodernist, particularly in “The...

3. Modernity, Modernisation, Modernism and the First World War 3.