Origins of Modernism – serie

First published in 1996. This comparative study investigates thematic and technical similarities in the works of the two authors who shared a cultural heritage and achieved comparable status in their separate literary traditions. Drawing upon theories by Bloom, Bakhtin, and Lacan, the book examines ways in which Henry James and Thomas Mann treat the creative artist and analyze the creative and interpretive processes in their fiction. The texts covered range from early works to their great modern novels: The Golden Bowl and Doctor Faustus To a great extent, the similarities between the works stem from the authors' preoccupation with artistic responsibility. Adopting Bloom's claim that the creative activity is an interpretive one, and that the reader, as well as the writer, interprets a text into being the book also investigates the reader's responsibility in confronting the dilemmas challenging James' and Mann's artist figures. Such challenges are the dangers of interpretation discussed in this book. Index. Bibliography.

This study examines the transformative relationship between Victorian mothers and their modern daughters in the works of six early British modernists (E. M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, D.H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf). The emphasis upon a female hero is a significant and largely unremarked similarity in some of the most significant works of these authors. In these novels, the female hero, in order to attain her full potential as an agent of social and artistic changes, must undergo a maturation process that leads from the father's world of language and public action to a new appreciation of the mother's unrecognized, alternative virtues. Exploring the emergence of the young, modern woman as the hero in the works of these formative authors, Hill traces the gendered development of notions of modernity and the negotiation of new forms of mother-daughter relationship at the birth of modernity and modernist art, providing a more richly nuanced understand of the issue of gender in modernism.