Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists, 1890-1929 - Modernists

When Virginia Woolf wrote that in or about December 1910 human character changed she was reacting specifically to the first impressionist exhibition in England. But her statement also summed up a feeling shared by the so-called modernist writers of that period, who, in the context of World War I, were beginning to think and write in new ways about their government and social structures, their place in the world and their universe. Although modernism is difficult to define and indeed is expressed quite differently by the writers featured in this volume, a common theme among these novelists is the idea that the novel, as an art form, is autonomous-not merely a reflection of the life it depicts but its own enterprise.

29 entries include: Ivy Compton-Burnett, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, Liam OFlaherty, Jean Rhys, Dorothy M. Richardson, Bram Stoker, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf.