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Our ways of thinking modernism and its legacy are imprinted with the pattern of an opposition, a struggle between two sets of extremes: objective and subjective; form and feeling; mechanistic and organic; mind and body; knowing and being; self and world; aesthetic and historical. The three writers whose work I explore in this thesis challenge prevailing notions of this oppositional discourse. Entering the scene of modernism late in its history, Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty and Maurice Merleau- Ponty develop a new kind of vision that makes us rethink the relationships between perceiver and perceived, between mind, body and world. All three writers undertake a fundamental reorganisation of the relationships between internal consciousness and external things through the narration of a perception that is outside the limits of discrete sensations or causal relationships. Physical things are neither pure objecthood nor merely external triggers for the ramblings of a solipsistic consciousness, rather they infringe on a consciousness whose own edges are indistinct. This writing establishes an interdependent and interlocutory relationship between subject and world, which become not opposite ends of a perceptual scale, but aspects of a common flesh. The intimate connection to the world is both comforting and threatening, both reinforcing subjectivity and de-centring it. The re-ordering of the connections between self and world leads to a reassessment of collective identity and historical agency, as well as impacting upon approaches to modes of representation. In trying to express the pre-linguistic experience of embodied consciousness, this writing looks to models of mute expression found in visual images. Exploring how the invisible aspects of experience emerge within the visible realm, the writing takes on an often hallucinatory or uncanny character. Charting the passage from being to doing, from perception to creation, from the style of the flesh to the style of fiction, Merleau-Ponty, Welty and Bowen dissolve received boundaries and distinctions at every level.

In recent years, the works of the Oxford Inklings C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Charles Williams have increasingly found academic acknowledgment. However, no real attempt has yet been made to evaluate their writings in terms of the literature of the twentieth century. The present thesis aims to remedy this omission by reading the works of the Inklings against those of their modernist contemporaries. Both modernist works and those of the Inklings are heavily influenced by the experience of the World Wars. The present study examines in particular how the topic of war is employed in modernism and the Inklings’ fantasy as a structuring agent, and how their works seek to contain war within the written work in an endeavour that is ultimately doomed to failure in the face of war’s reality. History plays a highly important role for both modernists and Inklings. Their works attempt to construct a coherent and authoritative (nationalist) history, while at the same time paradoxically acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. The works examined employ various forms of intertextuality to create authenticity and authority, and make extensive use of myth – which, according to Barthes, transforms an arbitrary history into self-evident (and thus authoritative) nature (cf. Roland Barthes, Mythologies. London: Vintage, 1992). Finally, it is the question of language that lies at the heart of the modernists’ and the Inklings’ projects. Both show a high degree of self-awareness and self-reflexivity, openly thematising that their respective worlds are constructed of words. They are also concerned with the perceived crisis of language, and with the necessity of discarding outworn traditions coupled with the difficulty of creating new ones.