ABSTRACT
History provides many contexts for the emergence of Modernism as a literary counterpart to the social and economic upheavals at the turn of the century: the fight for the vote by women up to 1918 is a crucial social and cultural aspect to the period; a second is the growing opposition between labour and capital (even in 1913 one per cent of the population owned two-thirds of the wealth), and strong unions were behind the miners’ and dockers’ strikes of 1912, after which TUC affiliation rose from 2.2 million in 1913 to 6.5 million in 1920; a third is the continued nationalist agitation for independence in Ireland, and the campaigns in Ulster against Home Rule. Some critics have seen the prewar period as one of mounting social disorder and political confrontation which, but for the war, would have led to revolution. There is certainly a literary history that can be charted in isolation from these political changes, as I shall outline below, but the social context should only be put in the background, not forgotten.
