When in 2012 we first began seeking a publisher for our proposed journal, we were told by a major press that Feminist Modernist Studies was "not needed" and librarians would not "know how to classify it" (?) We wondered how scholarship on modernism and feminism/ gender/sexuality could be simultaneously unnecessary (e.g. already done, fully integrated into modernist studies) and not recognizable as a category of academic study. Yet, even modernist feminist critics confess that feminism/gender appears oddly "everywhere and nowhere" 1 in nearly two decades of conference papers and publications emerging from the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its affiliated journal Modernism/Modernity (M/M). Upon closer scrutiny of these and other "new modernist" venues, feminist critics note that gender issues are either largely omitted, summarily added on, 2 orwithin feminist scholarshipsubsumed under modernism's broader intellectual expansions into globalization, cultural studies, and interdisciplinarity. Feminism/gender rarely serves as a point of entry into the new modernisms, yet critics continue to do important feminist work. Indeed, ironically, as Jessica Berman observes in this issue, feminist inquiry actually "helped to make possible the transnational, along with other recent 'turns' … in modernist studies" and "it [tacitly] undergirds much of the best work." Perhaps as Urmila Seshagiri suggests of the new modernism "one disciplinary process of expansion … overwhelm[ed] another." 3 Yet many feminist critics wary of being labeled old fashioned have felt pressured to authenticate their scholarship on women, gender, or feminist issues by establishing upfront its primary intent to illuminate other political, global, cultural, and interdisciplinary agendas. Accordingly, the gendered readings embedded ("everywhere") in these modernist studies leave unspoken ("nowhere") their often complexly interwoven implications, variously: for the sex/gendered constitutions of modernism; women's roles in shaping modernity; the suppression and recovery of lost modernist women writers; or the ways in which taking gender/the body/women as a point of entry might expand and/or completely alter current definitions of modernism. Setting aside the truth that feminist recovery work is never fully exhausted or "already done," we have not yet witnessed an intensive, large-scale exploration of gender and modernism in literature, art, and cultural studies. With notable exceptions, the 1980s and 1990s' surge of feminist inquiry during the self-described "post-modernist" era by definition evaded the modern period for the preferred study of Victorian, (queer) Decadent, and contemporary literature/culture/theory. 4 Modernism was then out of fashion, equated with T.S. Eliot and the New Critics' reactionary politics, elitism, and ahistoricism. Literary

Eliot's female contemporary, poet Kathleen Raine, recalled the impact of her first encounter with Eliot's poetry as "instantaneous and tremendous." 1 Muriel Bradbrook similarly exclaimed, "the effect of The Waste Land was not gloomy but exhilarating and intensely stimulating. .. [the poem] gave us a new world. .. 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!'" 2 May Sinclair admired Eliot particularly for his "disturbing" "genius." He is "dangerous," she remarked, not a poet whom "comfortable and respectable people can see, in the first moment after dinner." 3 And, as Gail McDonald's study of Eliot's reception by first-generation college women in this volume establishes, his rise in the academy was concurrent with the influx of women into universities, and many saw "their [own] pioneering energies mirrored in his work." Similarly, with the recent flourishing of queer theory (beginning mainly in the 1990s), gender studies of alternative "masculinities," and the expansion of feminist criticism into issues of race, class, and male sexuality, contemporary women critics are beginning to echo these early perceptions of Eliot's poetry as startlingly rebellious, "dangerous," and compelling. Queer theorist Colleen Lamos observes in Deviant Modernism that readers must "fac[e] up to the errant female sexual energies within his. .. poems if we are to continue to read Eliot with something other than hostility or incomprehension." 4 Feminist critic Bonnie Kime Scott comments in Refiguring Modernism, "The subjects of the emotions, the feminine, and the disorder of sexuality recur in Eliot's writing and make him a more confused figure than we found in. .. accounts that cite only his violent texts on women." 5 And poetry critic Marjorie Perloff concedes in her recent book's defining first chapter, "Avant-Garde Eliot," that whereas she formerly fixed Eliot as the static "symboliste"-against which she posited the more fluid, contemporary "poetics of indeterminacy"-she now encounters a "constructivist" poet in the early Eliot who uses language "as an active compositional agent, impelling the reader to participate in the process of construction." 6 Both generations of readers, separated by the critical gap

H. D and the Victorian Fin de Siecle argues foremost that H. D. eluded the male modernist flight from Romantic 'effeminacy' and 'personality' by embracing the very cults of personality in the Decadent Romanticism of Oscar Wilde, A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and D. G. Rossetti that her male contemporaries most deplored: the cult of the demonic femme fatale and of the 'effeminate' Aesthete androgyne. H. D., Laity maintains, used these sexually aggressive masks to shape a female modernism that freely engaged female and male androgyny, homoeroticism, narcissism and maternal eroticism. Focusing on the early Sea Garden, the plays and poetry of the 1920s and her late epic Trilogy, H. D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle demonstrates H. D.'s shift from the homoerotic 'white', vanishing tropology of the male androgyne fashioned by Pater and Wilde to the 'abject' monstrously sexual body of the Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent femme fatale.

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