Introduction

Summary

My introduction begins with Dorothy Richardson who, in the second volume of Pilgrimage, gives us a scene straight out of Jane Austen, which she then quickly abandons. Richardson’s particular form of modernism, I suggest, requires an engagement with realism in order to foreground its own interests. Using Richardson as a jumping off point, I outline the way modernism’s earliest critics reproduced arguments from the modernists themselves that emphasized their distinction from their realist predecessors. This debate then carried over to the seminal Marxist arguments of the 1930s between Lukács and Adorno, through which the terms modernism and realism hardened into an opposition that is still with us today. This reified divide cannot be simply wished away: we can still meaningfully distinguish works dominated by a realist impulse from those that use modernist’s characteristic disruptions. What we cannot do, I argue, is: (1) array these two movements simplistically via a false divide between form and content; (2) draw a straight line between politics and form. Instead, we must look to the ways in which specific aesthetic techniques combine to produce the form of each particular work of art.