The novel will also be considered as an attempt to reconcile the experimentalism of Joyce and Lewis and the traditional realism inherited from the great Victorians, chiefly the fiction of Thomas Hardy.

The transgressive potential of mythic thought is fully exploited by Lawrence in his treatment of identity and character, of individual and community, of the personal politics of domination and submission. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), the notion of mythopoeic consciousness as the mediating epistemology of the modern. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) attempts to reconcile the clash of the inward and the external, that is, the contrasting currents of early modernism. Chapter 4 directs our attention to a third current in modernism. Lewis’s comic point of view allows us to investigate the place of satire and the satiric spirit in modernity. Lewis’s painterly concentration on the objective and the external has important implications not only for the novel’s form, but for the particular inflections of its language. In contrast to Joyce’s affirmative interiority, Lewis, along with other modernist writers and painters, aggressively champions the external and the objective, providing us with an opportunity to complicate our notion of modernism by identifying a second current within the modernist stream.

Art, aestheticism, the cultural role of the artist, and the inter-relationship among the arts in modernism provide the wider critical framework for our reading of Wyndham Lewis’s satiric novel Tarr (1918, 1928). Chapter 3 continues with the focus on ‘modernism’ but from a different perspective from Joyce.

Women in love david herbert lawrence