Audience and Narrative in Female-Authored Diaries of the Twentieth Century: Analyzing Diaries As Modernist Texts

Author

Rose Grosskopf, College of the Holy CrossFollow

Date of Creation

5-2020

Document Type

Thesis

First Advisor

Prof. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Abstract

During the early twentieth century the literary modernists reacted to a changing world by pioneering new literary forms that could depict the subjective experience of thought. Their new forms eschewed tradition, convention, and narrative and experimented with literary techniques that could depict the mind in an expanded moment of time.

In her modernist essay “A Diary,” Gertrude Stein reveals the similarities between diaries and her own experimental modernist literature. “A Diary,” which is both modernist literature and a diary, provides a critical lens by which to examine other diaries as modernist texts. An analysis of the diaries of Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf, and Anaïs Nin, three female writers who maintained diaries in the twentieth century, reveals that their diaries also contain elements unique to modernist literature.

Comments

Reader: Prof. Leah Cohen

Departmental Honors thesis for English

Recommended Citation

Grosskopf, Rose, "Audience and Narrative in Female-Authored Diaries of the Twentieth Century: Analyzing Diaries As Modernist Texts" (2020). College Honors Program. 58.
https://crossworks.holycross.edu/honors/58