Subject Matters: The Discourses and Aesthetics of the British Novel, 1900-1939

This thesis examines a number of discourses which attempted to address the issues and conditions of modernity, and how select British modernists take up such discourses in their novels. I argue that the subject matter of their work projects distinct paradigms of human consciousness which become the property of modernist aesthetics. Consequently, this thesis links the discourse of sexuality with literary impressionism, suffragism and the Great War with Imagism and Vorticism, Marxist tropes of the 'thirties with the New Realism, and the rise of nationalism with the aesthetics of the Scottish Literary Renaissance. My work examines not only the extent to which content imposes formal features but also how certain novelists employ formal innovation to interrogate the discourses which are their subject matter. Through readings of novels by Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, Henry Green, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, my work recovers modernism's plurality as well as its engagement with issues of the subject and power.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Wipf-Miller, Carol Annette

Contributors dc:contributor

• James Hurt

• Literature, English

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI9737291

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81474