After a period during which Storm Jameson’s restricted literary identity has been that of the politically engaged woman writer, critical interest in the intellectual and stylistic complexities of her work is now reviving. Yet Jameson’s background in early English modernism and the manner in which it enriches her writing continues to pass unnoticed. This thesis uncovers new evidence of Jameson’s immersion in the early English modernisms of Alfred Orage’s Leeds Arts Club and New Age journal and of Dora Marsden’s journals, the New Freewoman and the Egoist, as an avant-garde student before the Great War. Drawing analogies with the post-colonial notions of ‘Manichean delirium’ and of ‘writing back to the centre’, this thesis argues that, subsequently – as a provincial socialist woman writer struggling to make her way at the predominantly male and elitist cultural centre – Jameson developed a vexed outsider-insider relation to English modernism which she expressed during the 1920s in a series of intertextual novels critiquing the contemporary cultural scene. It examines each of these novels chronologically, beginning with Jameson’s critique of the early modernisms of Orage, Marsden and associated writers in her first two novels, before moving on to her engagement, in turn, with the work of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis. Employing a socially oriented model of intertextuality, this thesis reads each novel synchronically as a sceptical and often witty probing of some of the polarised, and frequently contradictory, positions taken within the modernist debate. It also interprets the 1920s fiction diachronically as a developmental journey towards what Jennifer Birkett terms the ‘stylised realism’ of the 1930s and 40s, in which William James’s Pragmatism plays a central role, allowing Jameson to assimilate those intellectual and stylistic elements within English modernism that she values before leaving the rest behind.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:531274 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Gerrard, Deborah |
| Publisher | De Montfort University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/2086/4868 |
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