Book Description
This book explores key texts--Howard's End, The Rainbow, and the poetry of Owen, Sassoon, and Edward Thomas--to show the mingled continuation and rejection of convention as their characteristic achievement, exploring features often seen as failures. It also discusses the writing's increasing concerns with the inadequacies of language, seeing it within the frame of contemporary society and deconstructive theory, and attempting to locate them in relation to high Modernism.


Card catalog description
"This major reappraisal of an important yet confusingly diverse period of English writing suggests that many features earlier seen as shortcomings are in fact strengths, since the novels and poems simultaneously extend and ironically refuse the conventions of their predecessors. In its most extreme forms, this leads to a rejection of language itself, which may be bitterly satiric (in Siegfried Sassoon), explorative of the depths of human relations (in Lawrence's The Rainbow), or resigned and fulfilled (in Edward Thomas). Approaching the subject within its contemporary social and political frames, the book also considers the complex voice and movement of Forster's Howards End - enriched by its references to recent literary, social and topographical writing - and the structural effects of poetic reference and homoeroticism within Wilfred Owen's poems."--BOOK JACKET.

About the Author
Stuart Sillars is a member of the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This major reappraisal of an important yet confusingly diverse period of English writing suggests that many features earlier seen as shortcomings are in fact strengths, since the novels and poems simultaneously extend and ironically refuse the conventions of their predecessors. In its most extreme forms, this leads to a rejection of language itself, which may be bitterly satiric (in Siegfried Sassoon), explorative of the depths of human relations (in Lawrence's The Rainbow), or resigned and fulfilled (in Edward Thomas). Approaching the subject within its contemporary social and political frames, the book also considers the complex voice and movement of Forster's Howards End - enriched by its references to recent literary, social and topographical writing - and the structural effects of poetic reference and homoeroticism within Wilfred Owen's poems.

FROM THE CRITICS

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