Regenerating the Novel : Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence

The Regen(d)eration of the British Modern Novel is a study of the ways in which the cultural forces and discourses of gender inflect the practice and theory of three modernist British novelists, E.M.

Forster, May Sinclair and D. H. Lawrence. Building on previously explored interconnections between gender, theory and formal innovations in Virginia Woolf's novel writing, especially in Orlando , the author goes on to explore Forster's 'queered' use of fantasy, Sinclair's representation of 'manly genius' in both male and female streams of consciousness, and Lawrence's quest for the novel of 'phallic consciousness' as three diverse examples of how literary modernism wrestled with the 'gender crisis' of the early twentieth-century.

The books primary focus is a reading of each author's central novels in dialogue with his/her theoretical writings on the novel (as well as key critical voices) and the ways in which gender categories and attitudes are linked to formal structures in his/her work, with seemingly contradictory results between theory and practice in each case.