Why did turn-of-the-century England produce the kind of writing it did? That deceptively simple question is at the heart of Lyn Pykett's enquiry. She re-examines the beginning of the age of modernism, exploring its origins in nineteenth-century discourses: particularly discourses about women and gender.

'Engendering Fictions' challenges the claims that modernism represents a complete break with the past. The history of modernism has been a story of the removal of the 'great works' of modernist writing from the immediate material and historical circumstances of their origin, and their insertion into the timeless ideal order of the 'modern tradition'. Focusing on a wide range of authors, but particularly Woolf and Lawrence, Lyn Pykett takes issue with this representation of modernism and shows how traditional views offer an impoverished response to the writing of the early twentieth century.