ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

useful to attempt, as some of the essays in Narrative Middles do, to examine how
middles produce or create narrative form, meaning, and difference—and, what’s
more, to examine them as distinct middles—separated as much as possible from the
rest of the text, as beginnings and endings are separated from what is not the text.
Said’s discussion of modernist beginnings, I have argued, implies that the middles of
modernist texts may be more likely than others to exhibit this sort of difference.
However, where Victorian narrative middles operate primarily by developments at
the level of story, modernist narrative middles, as I will define them, operate
primarily by changing the way the narrative discourse operates. While it is not the
case that every modernist text contains a modernist middle, many modernist texts do
contain prominent narrative middles. Just as Victorian narrative middles structure
novels by reshaping the story’s plot, so do modernist narrative middles structure
novels by reshaping the application of modernist devices such as stream of
consciousness technique.
While narrative middles are this study’s primary object, then, modernism both
guides my selection of texts and informs how I read their middles. Modernism, if not
so hazy a concept as the middle, is nevertheless highly disputed in both its historical
timeframe and formal definition. Further complicating the matter is modernism’s
status as something of a pan-cultural concept, covering a wide range of cultural and
artistic productions, movements, and manifestations. Since this study is primarily
concerned with the middle as a formal, rather than conceptual, object, and one related
specifically to narrative, I find it most useful to work with Brian McHale’s definition
of modernism, which is likewise primarily formal and specific to narrative. My
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