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Olive Moore’s Headless Woman
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2013
- pp. 288-316
- 10.1353/mfs.2013.0028
- Article
- Additional Information
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Jane Garrity’s essay argues that Olive Moore’s neglected masterpiece, Spleen, uses the idea of reproduction—both formally and thematically—as a metaphor and foundation for a completely new model of creative practice. Drawing from recent feminist theory on experimental literary form and from conceptual frameworks within disability studies, Garrity situates Spleen’s preoccupation with pregnancy within the larger context of modernist cultural representations of disability, nonnormative sexuality, and racial science. The essay tracks the various ways that the novel is in effect an anatomy of the entrenched obstacles to women’s creative agency in early-twentieth-century England.