Zoë L . Henry
Zoë L. Henry is an Assistant Professor of English at Columbia University. Her first book project, "The Public Interior: Modernism, Theatricality, and Interracial Aesthetics," explores how women across a mixed-race modernist archive used the resources of the city to remain “private in public.” Through readings of Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dorothy West, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, and Ella Fitzgerald, Henry shows how women turned the city’s presumed open and collective dimensions into a landscape of self-protection and possibility. Other academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Virginia Woolf Miscellany, as well as the edited volumes Teaching James Joyce in the 21st Century, The Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms, The Routledge Companion to Virginia Woolf, and The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Her journalism has appeared in Slate, Insider, and Inc. magazine, among other national publications. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Brown University.
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Papers by Zoë L . Henry
Confusion, sets the terms by which Black women would go on to challenge the formidable color line of twentieth-century dance. The 1924 text dramatizes the exercise of feminine performance to arbitrate between competing doctrines of race essentialism by centering on the figure of the aloof, yet laboring ballerina of color. Fauset ultimately presents her heroine’s thinking as a kind of body to emphasize the conditions of mental work Black women have been forced to endure, in the modernist period as in our own.
received three identical sets of page proofs. The first was eventually sent
back to R. & R. Clark, providing the model for the British first edition of
Mrs. Dalloway. It is no longer extant, but we can make some educated
guesses as to what revisions were made there, by comparing the archived
proofs with the British edition. The second, intended for Woolf’s
American publisher, Harcourt, and now housed at the Lilly Library at
Indiana University, provides the basis for my analysis. The third was
meant to be Woolf’s personal copy, but she sent it to her dying friend,
the French painter Jacques Raverat. In a diary entry from this period,
Woolf lamented the long and laborious process of revision, “the dullest
part of the whole business of writing; the most depressing and exacting”
(The Diary of Virginia Woolf [D]3-4). And yet she made more than 300
changes, in one instance completely re-writing a major scene. From early
January to mid-March, Woolf continued to wrestle with her physical
health; Raverat died; Woolf worried over what critics would think; her
attention to detail waxed and waned. She left swaths of pages blank,
while in other places taking care to make minor punctuation adjustments,
rejecting her own corrections with a ‘stet’ or revising her own revisions.
She was, in short, both meticulous and idiosyncratic, her characteristic
purple pen leaving traces of intent, accident, and, as I shall argue, queer
feeling.
Confusion, sets the terms by which Black women would go on to challenge the formidable color line of twentieth-century dance. The 1924 text dramatizes the exercise of feminine performance to arbitrate between competing doctrines of race essentialism by centering on the figure of the aloof, yet laboring ballerina of color. Fauset ultimately presents her heroine’s thinking as a kind of body to emphasize the conditions of mental work Black women have been forced to endure, in the modernist period as in our own.
received three identical sets of page proofs. The first was eventually sent
back to R. & R. Clark, providing the model for the British first edition of
Mrs. Dalloway. It is no longer extant, but we can make some educated
guesses as to what revisions were made there, by comparing the archived
proofs with the British edition. The second, intended for Woolf’s
American publisher, Harcourt, and now housed at the Lilly Library at
Indiana University, provides the basis for my analysis. The third was
meant to be Woolf’s personal copy, but she sent it to her dying friend,
the French painter Jacques Raverat. In a diary entry from this period,
Woolf lamented the long and laborious process of revision, “the dullest
part of the whole business of writing; the most depressing and exacting”
(The Diary of Virginia Woolf [D]3-4). And yet she made more than 300
changes, in one instance completely re-writing a major scene. From early
January to mid-March, Woolf continued to wrestle with her physical
health; Raverat died; Woolf worried over what critics would think; her
attention to detail waxed and waned. She left swaths of pages blank,
while in other places taking care to make minor punctuation adjustments,
rejecting her own corrections with a ‘stet’ or revising her own revisions.
She was, in short, both meticulous and idiosyncratic, her characteristic
purple pen leaving traces of intent, accident, and, as I shall argue, queer
feeling.