ABSTRACT
In the initial decade or so of the twentieth century, Britain found itself in a strikingly contradictory position. The most advanced industrial country on the planet, Britain was alone among the European democracies in not having had a bourgeois revolution, and was consequently ruled by an insular elite who still largely saw the world and their place therein through the medieval lens of Arthurian legend. The avant-garde movements of the Edwardian era sought to challenge this ossified culture by drawing on the radical movements of continental rebels like the Futurists while also cultivating indigenous British values. The result was an often-contradictory combination. Among the most unsettling developments of the era, one with strong aesthetic implications, was the increasing emancipation of women. Women’s autonomy threatened the standard plot resolution of marriage, leading to a variety of formal experiments with strong political subtexts. While women contested patriarchal ideologies of the time, men found that the chivalric ideology on which they’d been weaned was a pack of lies as they died in the hundreds of thousands during the First World War. The result was a literature of bitter disillusionment whose sense of the gap between reality and representation prepared the ground for future radical formal innovation.
