Irene Gammel

The first biography of the enigmatic dadaist known as "the Baroness"--Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, "the Baroness" was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius. The editor Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary." Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of modernist scholars. In Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel traces the extraordinary life and work of this daring woman, viewing her in the context of female dada and the historical battles fought by women in the early twentieth century. Striding through the streets of Berlin, Munich, New York, and Paris wearing such adornments as a tomato-soup can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick, the Baroness erased the boundaries between life and art, between the everyday and the outrageous, between the creative and the dangerous. Her art objects were precursors to dada objects of the teens and twenties, her sound and visual poetry were far more daring than those of the male modernists of her time, and her performances prefigured feminist body art and performance art by nearly half a century.

Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity--A Cultural Biography

Baroness Elsa

Author Gammel shows how a literary classic was born. Lucy Maud Montgomery's own life began in the rural Cavendish family farmhouse on Prince Edward Island, the place that became the inspiration for Green Gables. Mailmen brought the world to the farmhouse'

The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic

Looking for Anne of Green Gables

Benjamin Lefebvre

The original essays in Anne's World offer fresh and timely approaches to issues of culture, identity, health, and globalization as they apply to Montgomery's famous character and to today's readers.

A New Century of Anne of Green Gables

Anne's World

By any standards, Lucy Maud Montgomeryâ€™sAnne of Green Gables is a stunning success. Published in 1908 (and not once out of print),Anne has sold more than 50 million copies, been translated into more than 17 languages (including Braille), and become the focus of international conferences devoted to its interpretation. Anne has remained, as Matthew sings in the musical, â€œforever young,â€ no small feat for the spunky, in-your-face redhead who, in 2008, celebrates her 100th birthday! But why Anne? How does Montgomery`s classic work pull so many international readers into the vortex of Anne`s freckled face and carrotty braids? How does this little book create such enduring interest around the world? The answer is far more intriguing than any story even Anne could have imagined. In her journal, Maud`s quick pen would froth up the tiniest details of her life into dramatic events, but that same pen never revealed a single word aboutAnne. As a result, the novelâ€™s secrets have remained sealed for over a century. Looking for Anne is the untold story of a literary classic and a writer who found inspiration in many places including the popular images of the era, such as beauty icons, fashion plates, and advertisements; a writer who quietly quarried her material from American mass market periodicals; who consciously imitated formula fiction to create marketable stories for juvenile periodicals, religious newspapers, and glamorous womenâ€™s magazinesâ€”and who ultimately, in the storm that brewed up the novel, also transcended these influences to create a twentieth-century literary classic that would conquer the world. Blending biography with cultural history, penetrating and uncensored, this is the definitive book onAnne of Green Gables.Looking for Anne captures both the spirit of Marillaâ€™s critical probing for â€œbald factsâ€ and Anneâ€™s belief in the infinite power of the imagination. It is a must-read for anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of Anne with an â€œe.â€ Praise forLooking for Anne: Looking for Anne takes a bold new look at Anne of Green Gables. If you have loved Anne of Green Gables and wonder how she came about, I recommend that you read Irene Gammelâ€™s book. â€” Kate Macdonald Butler (Lucy Maud Montgomeryâ€™s granddaughter) Visit the Looking for Anne webpage by clickinghere

How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic

Looking for Anne

Jason Wang

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic. The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema. The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.

Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic

Creative Resilience and COVID-19

Florine Stettheimer

Suzanne Zelazo

In 1949, Ettie Stettheimer collected her sister Florine's poems in Crystal Flowers, a posthumous, privately printed, elegant edition of 250. In addition to these rare poems, this new volume offers formerly unpublished material culled from archives, including three new poems and Stettheimer's libretto for her ballet "OrphŽe of the Quat-z-arts." Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo have re-situated this overlooked poet among her modernist sisters, presenting her as an important practitioner of a modernism that integrates multiple art forms. Sixty years after it first appeared for a select few, her poetry shines for a new generation of readers ready to appreciate.

Poems and a Libretto

Crystal Flowers

Associate Professor Irene Gammel, PH.D.

How is sexuality put to work in the social network of power? Why is power so obsessively inscribed on the sexualized female body? These questions are at the heart of naturalism's preoccupation with female sexuality. Presenting a revisionary reading of such crucial German, Canadian, and American texts as Fanny Essler, Settlers of the Marsh, and Sister Carrie, Irene Gammel reveals that naturalism is frequently implicated in the very power structures it critiques. A predominantly male genre, naturalism appropriated a disruptive female sexuality not so much to "liberate" it from the shackles of Victorian repression as to contain it within the male boundaries of naturalism. Reading European and North American naturalism through the lens of feminist and Foucauldian theories of power, Gammel argues that twentieth-century naturalism increasingly exposes the genre's internal ideological contradictions.

Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove

Sexualizing Power in Naturalism

Invoking theories of popular culture, film, literature, drama, and tourism, contributors probe the emotional attachment and loyalty of many generations of readers to L.M. Montgomery's books.

L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture

Making Avonlea

University of Toronto Press

Elizabeth R. Epperly

Contributors from a wide range of disciplines explore L.M. Montgomery's writing and its relation to Canadian nationalism, including regionalism, canon formation, and Canadian-Amerian cultural relations.

L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture

Who ultimately is L.M. Montgomery, and why was there such an obsession with secrecy, hiding, and encoding in her life and fiction? Delving into the hidden life of Canada's most enigmatic writer, The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery answers these questions. The eleven essays illuminate Montgomery's personal writings and photographic self-portraits and probe the ways in which she actively shaped her life as a work of art. This is the first book to investigate Montgomery's personal writings, which filled thousands of pages in journals and a memoir, correspondence, scrapbooks, and photography. Using theories of autobiography and life writing, the essays probe the author's flair for the dramatic and her exuberance in costuming, while also exploring the personal facts behind some of her fiction, including the beloved Anne of Green Gables. Focussing on topics such as sexuality, depression, marriage, aging, illness, and writing, the essays strip away the layers of art and artifice that disguised Montgomery's most intensely guarded secrets, including details of her affair with Herman Leard, her marriage with Ewen Macdonald, and her friendships with Nora Lefurgey and Isabel Anderson. The book also includes rare photographs taken by Montgomery and others, many of which have not previously appeared in print. One of the highlights of The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery is the inclusion of a secret diary that Montgomery wrote with Lefurgey in 1903. This hilarious document is a rare find, for Montgomery's teasing banter presents us with a new voice that is distinct from the sombre tone of her journals. Published here for the first time, more than 100 years after its composition, this diary is virtually unknown to readers and scholars and is a welcome addition to the literature on this important figure. This volume fills in many of the blanks surrounding Montgomery's personal life. Engaging and erudite, it is a boon for scholars and Montgomery fans alike.

The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery

The recent 100 year anniversary of the first publication of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has inspired renewed interest in one of Canada's most beloved fictional icons. The international appeal of the red-haired orphan has not diminished over the past century, and the cultural meanings of her story continue to grow and change. The original essays in Anne's World offer fresh and timely approaches to issues of culture, identity, health, and globalization as they apply to Montgomery's famous character and to today's readers. In conversation with each other and with the work of previous experts, the contributors to Anne's World discuss topics as diverse as Anne in fashion, the global industry surrounding Anne, how the novel can be used as a tool to counteract depression, and the possibility that Anne suffers from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Anne in translation and its adaptation for film and television are also considered. By establishing new ways to examine one of popular culture's most beloved characters, the essays of Anne's World demonstrate the timeless and ongoing appeal of L.M. Montgomery's writing.

Irene Gammel

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