Modernism is often discussed in terms of movement: the increased speed brought about by new technologies and new modes of transport; the endlessly circulating networks of international capitalism; the global migrations of peoples. Anglo-American literary modernism, in particular, can be understood through transatlantic journeys, and the expatriate artistic communities created by these voyages. Yet despite this, modernist studies has continued to employ a nationally bounded methodology. This chapter’s focus on the 'black Atlantic' - African-American and Afro-Caribbean modernist writers and their literal and metaphorical transatlantic journeys - necessarily complicates the relationship between discrete nations and cultural production. In the epigraph to this chapter, taken from Jamaican Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929), West Indian Ray is working as a nude model in Paris. While the student artists signal their modernity through their knowledge of primitivism, their construction and objectification of the nonmodern, black body here does not allow for Ray’s entry into 'civilized' discourse.

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, a new and fertile discourse on the art of fiction emerged alongside the extensive reshaping of fictional form itself. This interweaving of critical and creative activities typifies the self-consciousness we have come to find in modernism across all the arts. Manifestos, declarations, excurses and rationales are the inevitable accompaniments to modernist experimentation, just as reflexivity becomes lodged in the grain of the artwork: the Cézanne canvas cannot fail to be about the discourse of painting as much as it is about the pursuit of natural phenomena; the Imagist poem, stripping itself of the trappings of the 'poetical', succeeds in this very gesture in foregrounding the discourses of poetry. In the case of the art of fiction, the very use of the term 'art' is an emergent sign of this new self-consciousness.

It is important to recognize the influence of a particular historical context of aesthetic theory and practice, drawn mainly from France and Russia, in the development of Anglo-American modernist fiction, ranging from Gustave Flaubert’s expressed desire to write a novel about nothing, to the coruscating naturalism of Emile Zola and the psychological intensities of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Through this context the idea of the modern novel comes to occupy a complex space bounded by the principles of abstraction on the one hand and realism on the other.

This essay presents a brief comparative survey of six representative writers and selected key texts on the art of modernist fiction. I want to suggest how far, through a cluster of recurrent concepts - art itself, but also life, experience, the human, realism, morality, freedom, democracy, readers - the discourse on modernist fiction is fundamentally Janus-faced, looking simultaneously inwards, towards form and language, and outwards, towards the changing material circumstances in which fiction was being produced and consumed.

The early modernist novel,with its variations on the 'stream-of-consciousness' method, attempted to capture the inner life with an immediacy and authenticity that preceding realisms had lacked. This emphasis on documenting the subjectivity of the individual was also, however, potentially problematic. The modernist novel increasingly had to perform the difficult trick of rendering subjectivity while at the same time distancing and universalizing it. This 'objectifying' was for some novelists to be achieved through the power of aesthetic form, a would-be classicism in which the artwork becomes autonomous from the subjective vagaries of its creator, an aesthetic of 'impersonality', to use T. S. Eliot’s term. For this 'late' version of modernism, the autobiographical becomes almost an anathema, because the value of the work of art now lies precisely in its transcendence of the personal. And this view, continued in the traditions of New Criticism and poststructuralism, has remained powerful until quite recently. If reading a novel in relation to the biographical is to be guilty of being reductive, then writing a novel as autobiographical expression is tantamount to original sin.

The relationship between the autobiographical impulse - the desire to write one’s life - and modernist conceptions of objectifying form was particularly vexed for women writers. It is striking that at the precise moment when they tried to give voice to the self at its most personal, women modernists also invariably embraced an extreme formalism. In part, this formalism was an attempt to raise the private to the public register of a literary discourse.

The question of the legacies of modernist fiction for the generations of writers that followed could lead us in a number of different directions. As perspectives on the literary and cultural history of the past century shift and alter, maps will be differently drawn. In particular, the literary-historical narrative in which 'high modernism' gave way (after the extreme experiment of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and with the coming of the Second World War) to postwar realism, and cosmopolitanism to parochialism, requires, and is receiving, substantial revision. The 'realisms' of many mid-twentieth century writers and beyond are beginning to look not only more interesting and more complex, but closer to the 'modernisms' that they are conventionally held to have displaced. There is much new work to be undertaken on this and related questions. The focus of this chapter is a little different, in that it explores the legacies of modernism as a question of direct, rather than diffuse, influences. It discusses writers of the mid-twentieth century (including B. S. Johnson, Saul Bellow and Doris Lessing) and their relationship to their modernist predecessors, but its primary focus is on the ways in which recent and contemporary novelists (including Paul Auster, Alan Hollinghurst, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, Michael Cunningham and Colm Tóibín) are engaging with modernist fiction and its creators.

The aim of this Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel is to assist readers of modernist fiction, whether they are experienced or new readers of this challenging and stimulating body of literary work. The image of a 'companion' here suggests a kind of comradeship: a sharing of experiences as well as the illumination and pleasure gained through a conversation involving different viewpoints and diverse enthusiasms. This volume seeks, in that sense, to be a good companion to the reader. But it also aspires to be a challenging companion, offering new perspectives, teasing out difficult ideas, and drawing on the rich comparative and critical insights that can be gained through scholarship and research. Its contributors are experts in their field, and bring to their accounts of key ideas and key authors an extensive and deep knowledge of the period and the texts of modernism. The organization of this volume is intended to give the reader the greatest possible benefit from this expertise, and thus to help him or her to gain significant insight into whichever modernist novels they are reading.

The idea of ‘modernism’

The focus of this Companion is the experience of reading English-language fictional narratives from the early years of the twentieth century. The second section of this volume is concerned explicitly with the challenges and the pleasures of reading the work of selected novelists who have been identified as key to modernist fiction. But in addition to such close readings of selected novels and novelists, some attention also needs to be given to the category that has shaped the analyses of these novels by the various contributors and also underpins the coherence of this volume: the category of ‘modernism’. This category is the focus of the five chapters within the first section of the Companion.

By 1944 the literary critic Malcolm Cowley had been reading the novels of William Faulkner (1897-1962) for some time, and 'gradually and with errors of judgment' he had begun to 'perceive a pattern' in the novels that had largely escaped him on first reading (6). Among the first to describe the emergence of literary modernism in America, Cowley was struck by the inverse relationship between his own growing certainty of the importance of Faulkner’s fiction and what he termed the author’s ‘quoted value on the literary stock exchange’ (as he noted, by ‘the later years of World War II … [Faulkner’s] seventeen books were effectively out of print’), and he decided ‘to write a long essay on Faulkner … to see whether it mightn’t redress the balance between his worth and his reputation’ (5–6).

Lewis’s alternative modernism

The inclusion of Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957) in this Companion reflects a significant shift in our conception of the modernist novel over the past fifteen years. Although Lewis himself has frequently appeared as a major personality in narratives of modernism, his literary works have not had the wide readership of the novels of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf. Since the mid-1990s, however, Lewis’s work has been cited in mainstream modernist studies with increasing regularity. This can be explained in part by the Black Sparrow Press’s republication of Lewis’s work, a large proportion of which had been out of print since its first publication. In addition, although many of Lewis’s novels existed only on the margins of the modernist canon, they had over the intervening years accumulated a strong body of scholarly material generated by a small group of dedicated scholars, on which recent criticism has built. Finally, changes in modernist studies, and indeed in literary studies more generally, have created a congenial climate for Lewis’s work.

Lewis’s writing is no longer the aberration it evidently appeared to many in 1954, when Hugh Kenner defended Lewis’s inclusion in Methuen’s 'The Makers of Modern Literature' series as follows:

'I believe this may be our last chance to do something remarkable in the way of imaginative literature,' T. S. Eliot declared, when recommending Djuna Barnes’s (1892-1982) Nightwood (1936) for publication with Faber and Faber in 1935. Initial readers, while acknowledging the virtuosity of the novel’s style, were yet largely bemused by the obscurity of its 'plot' and discomforted by a pervasive overtone of the profane and the sacrilegious. In his introductory Preface for the American edition the following year, Eliot set about elucidating the structure and method of the novel, downplaying its more controversial subject matter and forestalling charges of unreadability. Nightwood, he explained, 'demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give', because 'it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it'. To understand the novel as a masterpiece of modern art, in other words, the reader should be prepared to suspend any expectation of conventional linear narrative and recognize that it is constructed according to the formalist principles of modern poetry. Nightwood having been claimed by Eliot as the final expression of high modernism, American reviewers followed his lead with palpable relief, the Brooklyn Eagle going so far as to recommend it as 'an excellent companion piece for “The Waste Land”'.

In 1911 the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote an impassioned preface to a new edition of William James’s Pragmatism (1907). James, the distinguished American psychologist, had recently died, and Bergson paid homage, in his preface, to the mind with which he had felt such a strong affinity. He stressed the centrality of redundancy and superabundancy to James’s vision of reality: 'While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary - too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything … Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant' (267).

Bergson then went on to draw an essentially literary analogy between traditional (pre-Jamesian) philosophy and the artifice of the stage play:

However astute Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation that 'the big problems [are] like cold baths; you have to get out as fast as you [get] in', one would be ill advised to withdraw too rapidly from the 'big problem' of modernism. There is much to be gained, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, by framing the fiction of a given author in accordance with the historical, stylistic and thematic parameters of the modernist aesthetic. Yet just where a writer as slippery as Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) lies on the spectrum that extends from early to late, from low to high and then post, has prompted considerable debate in recent years. It will not be the purpose of this chapter to enter that debate, but rather to suggest a means of access into Beckett’s novels that will reveal the essence of their link to modernism, regardless of the prefix one assigns to the term.

We might begin by noting that Beckett’s fiction clearly exhibits the oppositional spirit fundamental to the modernist enterprise. In fact, his experimentation with novelistic form reveals an opposition to the conventional rules of narration so extraordinary that when he began writing novels it provoked a veritable crisis of genre. That is to say, the congruence of form and content - such as is found in the dissolution, at once, of any coherent storytelling and of any real character identity - threw into question the very nature of the novel itself. Already in his 1931 essay Proust, which appeared in print several years before his first novel, one perceived the preoccupation with the recovering of lost selves in which the primary tension of his own novelistic concerns would originate. If reality in Proust’s masterwork depended upon the projection of an individual’s subjective awareness and, at the same time, every individual was revealed to be a succession of individuals, reality maintained nonetheless a veneer of constancy.

E. M. Forster's career as a novelist was spectacularly lopsided. Born in 1879, he published his first four novels in quick succession (Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910)), had largely finished what would eventually appear as Maurice by 1914, and published his most famous and ambitious novel, A Passage to India, ten years later (though it is worth mentioning that he started writing it in the wake of his 1912-13 visit to India and struggled to bring it to completion). Then, in the mid-1920s, with the plaudits of both reviewers and the wider reading public ringing in his ears, buoyant sales in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and two prestigious prizes for Passage on his mantelshelf, Forster the novelist shut up shop. His last is the only one of his six novels to be entirely set abroad and at the time it seemed to signal Forster's departure for new fictional horizons, yet in reality it marked his journey's end. He was only halfway through his life (he died in 1970) but he would never again be tempted to repeat Passage's extravagant success. 'I cant [sic] believe there will be anoth[er] novel', he told a correspondent around this time. 'The legs of my camera could not stand the strain.

However, while Forster the novelist retired prematurely, the professional man of letters remained as busy as ever, and in the long, anxious buildup to the Second World War (and the decades that followed it), he established an international reputation, through his essays, reviews, lectures, and broadcasts, as one of the most prominent, authoritative, and engaging public intellectuals of his day, an aspect of his career examined in depth by David Medalie in Chapter 2 of this volume.

What is the status and relevance of the word 'woman' in Forster's writing? The first quotation above is spoken by a man to the woman he disastrously marries in a novel that takes its title from Shelley's epithet for marriage but which is dedicated to brotherhood. The second is spoken, ironically enough, by a man opting for marriage and forsaking (platonic) love between men, to a sexually braver man, in a novel that openly explores homosexual relationships in a regime of compulsory heterosexuality. Is the word 'woman' functioning differently in each case? This chapter considers Forster's representations of women and, more broadly, the changing understanding of what such representation might involve.

Most of Forster's novels and many of his short stories include strongly realised women protagonists or characters. George Watson finds Margaret Schlegel, for example, 'the most fully realised Englishwoman in the fiction of her century', while Rose Macaulay finds all Forster's women characters, old and young, 'alive with [. . .] imaginative actuality', and there is a rich and continuing seam of criticism exploring Forster's typology of women. Moreover, 'Forster and Women' may in some ways appear a limited if not obsolete topic, suggesting (1970s) vintage feminist criticism and ignoring its unspoken (and, for many, the now more relevant) topic of 'Forster and Men'. But the sense of obsolescence may not be due merely (and somewhat crudely) to the acknowledgement of biographical information concerning Forster's homosexuality.

Biblical teaching discloses the reality of the comprehensive saving work through which sinful humans are reconciled to the triune God's eternally gracious presence. The divine love for humanity, first expressed through the grace of creation and election, culminates eschatologically in the death of Jesus Christ (John 19:30; Rom. 5:6-8; 1 Pet. 3:18). The resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ successively attest to the finality of God's salvific work, thus ushering in the empowering ministry of the Holy Spirit through which the gift of salvation is offered to Jews and Gentiles alike (Acts 1; Rom 8:11). Placed within this eschatologically oriented construal, conversion and sanctification are essentially the Holy Spirit's work of applying Christ's atoning work to us.

THE GRACE OF CONVERSION FROM THE TEXTURES OF SIN

A hallmark of evangelical church life is insistence on a personal conversion experience. Indeed, the gospel message can be summed up as a divine call to conversion of sinners. From the divine side, conversion points to God's electing and transforming grace. From the side of human experience, conversion involves repentance and faith that mark a decisive inauguration of the Christian life. Accordingly, a discussion of conversion calls for phenomenological consideration of the interchange between God and human.

In the course of his lifetime, Forster wrote six novels, but that simple statement conceals more than it reveals. Those novels were penned during a period of only twenty years in what was a very long life extending over ninety years. Born in 1879, at the height of the late Victorian period, Forster died in 1970 in a post-modern England. The novels themselves cluster in the first two decades of the twentieth century; the first, Where Angels Fear to Tread, appeared in 1905 and the last written, A Passage to India, was published in 1924. One novel, Maurice, was not published until 1971, but, as Forster notes, it was begun in 1913 and finished in 1914. Its subject - homosexuality - determined that it would wait almost half a century before publication made it available to a general readership.

In addition to the fact that his novels cluster into a short period of his life, Forster also penned his ultimate word on the subject, Aspects of the Novel, as a series of lectures delivered in the spring of 1927, published in the same year, and unaltered in subsequent reissues of the volume. Forster's work is helpfully illuminated both by examining that short work on the novel and by recognising his distinctive position as a novelist, bridging the late Victorian and early modern periods.