Engendering Fictions (Writing in History)

Lyn Pykett

Why did early twentieth-century England produce the kind of writing it did? That deceptively simple question is the mainspring of Lyn Pykett's enquiry. She offers a bold re-examination of the age of modernism, exploring its origins in certain nineteenth-century discourses, particularly discourses about women and gender. She challenges the claims of both self-professed modernists and their later academic appropriators that modernism represents a complete break with the past. The history of canonical high modernism has been a story of the removal of the 'great works' of 'literary writing' from the circumstances of their creation: a process that attempts to seal them hermetically into a timeless ideal order of the 'modern tradition'. Focusing on a wide range of authors, including Woolf and Lawrence, Pykett takes issue with this representation of modernism. Her concern, above all, is to return the writing of the early twentieth century to history, and to insist that the written text is as much an historical event as, say, the South African War or Lloyd George's 'People's Budget'. . Engendering Fictions both demonstrates the impoverishment of traditional views on the writing of the early twentieth century and opens the way to a new understanding of one of the major periods of English writing.