Introduction

Summary

The introduction opens with a reading of a passage from a 1914 letter by D. H. Lawrence to establish three major facets of the book’s argument: (1) for many modernists, cross-sex collaboration offered a practical way of using gender difference as a source of creative energy; (2) both Lawrence and many of his contemporaries viewed shared creative activity between women and men as deeply and positively subversive; and (3) rather than envisioning cross-sex collaboration as a harmonious synthesis of opposites, Lawrence revels in the prospect of its leading to unresolvable gender conflict. It then introduces my concept of the discord aesthetic, which refers to the modernists’ tendency to use conflict between the sexes as a creative catalyst and infuse the texts they made together with evidence of that conflict; situates my argument with respect to prior scholarship on the intersections between modernism, gender, and literary couplings; and acknowledges my debt to the textual scholarship methodology of reading the linguistic and material dimensions of texts as working together to create meaning.