Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature

The Modernist movement in literature had revolutionary aspirations and pioneered new possibilities of literary expression. One of its major projects was to question the nature of selfhood and to rewrite personal experience in terms of fragmentation, conflict and discontinuity. English literary Modernism, in particular, broke down the assumption that self-experience is unitary and coherent. This book represents an exploration of the ways in which key modern writers challenged conventional ways of characterizing selfhood and, whether by poetic montage or stream-of-consciousness writing, developed a discourse expressive of the subtleties of experience in a post-Freudian world. It is argued that modernist texts were involved in self-representation long before post-structuralist or post-modernist theories were applied.