Why did turn-of-the-century England produce the kind of writing it
did? That deceptively simple question is at the heart of Lyn
Pykett's enquiry. She re-examines the beginning of the age of
modernism, exploring its origins in nineteenth-century discourses:
particularly discourses about women and gender.

'Engendering
Fictions' challenges the claims that modernism represents a complete
break with the past. The history of modernism has been a story of the
removal of the 'great works' of modernist writing from the immediate
material and historical circumstances of their origin, and their
insertion into the timeless ideal order of the 'modern tradition'.
Focusing on a wide range of authors, but particularly Woolf and
Lawrence, Lyn Pykett takes issue with this representation of modernism
and shows how traditional views offer an impoverished response to the
writing of the early twentieth century.