Modernists at Odds

Modernism’s most contentious rivals, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, are traditionally seen as opposites. This is the first book to explore the resonances between the two writers, revealing that their lives, works, and careers have striking similarities. For starters, they shared the same literary agent, published in the same literary magazines, fought similar legal battles against censorship, and were both pirated by Samuel Roth.

The parallels run deeper. This volume revels in two writers who share classic modernist paradoxes: both are at once syncretists and shatterers, bourgeois cosmopolitans, prudish libertines, displaced nostalgists, and rebels against their native lands. These essays consider mutual themes such as gender, class, nature, and religion, highlighting the many intersections among the issues that concerned both Joyce and Lawrence. Modernists at Odds is a long overdue extended comparison of two of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century.