Engendering Fictions - The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (Paperback)

Why did turn-of-the-century England produce the kind of writing it did? This question is the mainspring of Lyn Pykett's enquiry. She offers a re-examination of the dawning of the age of modernism, exploring its origins in certain 19th-century discourses: discourses about women, discourses about gender, and other discourses that are organized in gendered terms. The text challenges the claims of both self-professed modernists, amd their later academic appropriators, that modernism represents a complete break with the past. The history of modernism has been a story of removal of the "great works" of modernist writing from the immediate material and historical circumstances of their birth, and their insertion into the timeless ideal order of the "modern tradition". Focusing on a wide range of authors, but particularly Woolf and Lawrence, this book takes issue with this historical blindness and shows how traditional views offer an impoverished response to the writing of the early 20th century.