ETD

• A Day Off
• androginy
• canon
• cognitive criticism
• everyday
• extraordinary moments
• fantasy
• feminism
• gendered spaces
• Harriet Hume
• intermental connections
• intermodernism
• intersubjectivity
• interwar period
• Katharine Burdekin
• London
• modernism
• Mrs. Dalloway
• new modernist studies
• one-day novel
• professionalization
• Proud Man
• Rebecca West
• Storm Jameson
• telepathy
• the gender of modernism
• time travel
• utopia
• Virginia Woolf
• Yorkshire

Beginning with an overview of Modernism as an historical and critical category, the present thesis seeks to define the sometimes ex-centric approaches to literary experimentalism adopted by Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, Rebecca West, and Katharine Burdekin during the interwar period. Our comparative analysis of the one-day stories informing Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and A Day Off (1933), and then of the fantasy Harriet Hume (1929) and time-travel report Proud Man (1934), details the relationship between these authors’ treatment of four main thematic macro-categories: time, place, gender, and mind-representations. In these four novels, these concepts have been found to function as fundamental and interconnected organizing principles, revealing these authors’ continual pushing of personal, political, and aesthetic boundaries.
Woolf, West, Jameson, and Burdekin all responded to the socio-political and aesthetic challenges posed by the interwar period by adopting unconventional narrative structures and innovative stylistic devices. Time constraints and manipulations, spatial characterization and de-stabilization, multifaceted representations of gender and identity, a blend of traditional and unconventional narrative stances, along with genre experimentalism, intertextuality, and the inclusion of novel philosophical, psychoanalytical, and psychical research-related concepts all emerge as intertwined in these authors’ continual search for new paths to examine the conflicts engendered by modernity.
With the obvious exception of Virginia Woolf, these authors’ confrontations with genre and form have been overlooked or underestimated by most critical accounts of the period. Nonetheless, our research foregrounds significant intersections between their approaches, especially pivoting around the exploration of new possibilities for the configuration and literary representation of intersubjective connections. From our analysis, these four novels emerge as unmistakably involved in a deep intertextual and epistemic dialogue not only with each other, but with their larger cultural milieu.