ABSTRACT
Anthony Patterson concentrates on Arnold Bennett’s literary journalism, ‘Books and Persons’ in William Orage’sNew Age from 1908 until 1911 and Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard from 1926 until his death, and examines Bennett’s attitude to literary experimentation generally, and specifically his response to Modernist writing. Patterson maintains that Bennett lauds Chekhov’s ‘absolute realism’ while criticising 1920s British fiction in the same way Woolf discriminates sharply between the Georgians and the Edwardians. Bennett was invariably more open and generous to the Modernists than they were to him, as evident in his superlative, if critical, praise of writers such as D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce.
