Structure and dissolution in English writing, 1910-1920

"This major reappraisal of an important yet confusingly diverse period of English writing suggests that many features earlier seen as shortcomings are in fact strengths, since the novels and poems simultaneously extend and ironically refuse the conventions of their predecessors. In its most extreme forms, this leads to a rejection of language itself, which may be bitterly satiric (in Siegfried Sassoon), explorative of the depths of human relations (in Lawrence's The Rainbow), or resigned and fulfilled (in Edward Thomas).

Approaching the subject within its contemporary social and political frames, the book also considers the complex voice and movement of Forster's Howards End - enriched by its references to recent literary, social and topographical writing - and the structural effects of poetic reference and homoeroticism within Wilfred Owen's poems."--Jacket.