Inherited Worlds: The British Modernist Novel and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre
Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Cleary, Joe
Abstract
“Inherited Worlds” studies the way that British modernist novels reworked older novelistic genres, especially as a way to figure a crisis of British culture—and of the novel as a form. In chapters on the “industrial novel,” the “artist novel,” the “country-house novel,” and the “travel novel,” I show how modernist writers repurposed and recombined nineteenth-century genres and Victorian “family plots” to both reflect and engage the antimonies of the novel in the era of British imperial decline, the apparent massification and globalization of modern western culture, and revolutionary changes in gender relations and family life. In my reading, Britain’s so-called “semimodernized modernism” is characterized neither by an unconscious absence of radical experimentation nor by a stubborn adherence to nineteenth-century realism, but in fact by a skepticism to both. The British modernist novel, I argue, is defined precisely by a struggle to salvage the realist tradition and its genre system for a new purpose, in a new world. “Genre” is not only the critic’s tool for understanding the literary tradition, but the way the modernist novel represents that tradition—and attempts to incorporate, reform, break with, or revolutionize it. Familiar works can thus appear strange, hybrid objects: novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924-1928), Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris (1935), and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) narrate the erosion of the social basis for the realist novel, while still working within and reshaping realist forms, or genres. Specifically, these novels describe the historical processes whereby the genres and family plots that defined the nineteenth-century novel tradition (and formed the basis of Britain’s global literary prestige) were becoming obsolete. There could be no credible nineteenth-century-style industrial novels in a world where industrialization was already “complete,” nor country-house novels that ignored the fall of the aristocracy as a powerful political class, nor travel novels in a fully globalized world where the overcoming of sameness and homogenization appeared a more urgent concern than mastering the unknown or the exotic. Nor could the novel attain resolution via the family plot if the family as an institution was deemed as instrumentalizing and disfiguring as the society that produced it. In this way, I argue, the modernist novel in Britain turned “the tradition” against itself, reflecting on the conditions of possibility of its own inherited genres, and laying bare the history that had hollowed out the power and progressive assurance of the realist novel. Drawing on Marxist-feminist theories of social reproduction, I describe how the modernist novel imagines “the family” especially as a metaphor for the impossible struggle between continuity and rupture. Together, the novels I study develop an analysis of the centrality of family plots in the British novel tradition, as well as a (mystified) social analysis of the way the modern family has been transformed into a machine for maintaining and servicing capitalist production. The regeneration of the family, a trope so important to the resolution of plot in the nineteenth-century novel, is now impossible: to reproduce the family—at least in its traditional form—would be to submit to a reified culture and a mechanical society. Rewriting Victorian family narratives, I show, thus becomes a way to figure the “inheritance” of the modern British novel and a means to utilize Britain’s robust “social” novel tradition in order to forge a distinct version of literary modernism. The purpose of the social novel is suddenly to narrate how the social has become irredeemable—and to call for aesthetic and cultural revolution, which might, in turn, be the only way to produce new forms of sociality.
Recommended Citation
McGowan, Christopher, "Inherited Worlds: The British Modernist Novel and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 830.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/830
