ABSTRACT
The First World War shattered the vainglorious notion that Britain had achieved the highest expression of human civilization and could rule over other nations like a beacon in the night. With such illusions banished, all that remained seemed to be horror, grasping violence and chaotic uncertainty. Many writers reacted to the smashing of facile models of progress by searching for some hidden mythological paradigm that might redeem the smashed idols of the past. All too often, though, modernist exploration of myth simply emphasized the gap between mythological and aesthetic order and the chaos of the mundane. At the same time, revolutionary new ideas of the fungibility of time and space, and of our apprehension of both through the partial lenses of our senses and memory, led to dramatic aesthetic innovations such as the creation of stream-of-consciousness narrative. Often these new aesthetic modes were yoked to attempts to include previously marginal forms of textuality and subjectivity in representation. Other varieties of high modernism, however, reacted against the crisis of the times by attempting to shore up dominating and oppressive models of being.
