Abstract

Abstract:

Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and a succeeding generation of critics would repeatedly dismiss John Galsworthy as an "old fashioned" novelist incapable of embracing the aesthetic experimentation of modernist fiction. Woolf especially faulted her literary rivals with the claim, however inaccurate, that their fiction failed to capture the essential truths of individual life. While Woolf's dismissal of the Edwardians is well known, there has been scant scholarly attention to how Galsworthy responded to such attacks, how he positioned himself aesthetically and politically vis-à-vis an ascendant modernism. This article brings to light Galsworthy's unacknowledged participation in the changes into modernism. Galsworthy was just as much an interpreter of modernity as his Georgian successors. To reconsider Galsworthy's voice in those debates provides us with the opportunity to reassess the modernist struggle and his long-overlooked views on the role of the artist and on the nature, function, and scope of the novel.

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