Daily Modernism

In contrast to autobiography, which is intended for a public audience, diaries have traditionally been thought of as a private record of an individual's life. In Daily Modernism Elizabeth Podnieks shows that the diary can and should be read as both autobiography and fiction. She makes it clear that Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anais Nin wrote their diaries under the pretence that they were private, while always intending them to be published. Redrawing established boundaries between genres, Podnieks details how diaries inscribe the aesthetics of literary modernism. Drawing on feminist theory, literary history, biography, and anecdotes, she argues that the diary is an especially subversive genre for women writers.