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

served to marginalize experimental literature in Britain. According to Rayner
Heppenstall, the subject of this chapter, “Before the war, it had been possible, though
it had not been easy, to be a serious, full-time professional, free-lance writer,” he
wrote in in 1963. “The species was now extinct” (Intellectual Part 50). Nevertheless,
a few British writers continued to write in and expand the modernist form both during
and after the war, and they continued in many cases to use middles to deepen, expand,
and redirect the epistemological poetics of modernism, and to bind their narrative
experiments into complete novelistic narratives.
The final two chapters of this study will concern themselves with post-war
experimental British novels, both of which contend with and arguably participate in at
least some aspects of postmodern literature. This chapter concerns a novel written and
published during the war itself. While To the Lighthouse makes World War I and its
trauma the middle of its narrative, a separation that binds the novel together, Woolf
creates her narrative middle retrospectively, from a position after the war. In that
novel, the middle stretches the conventions of both modernist and traditional
narrative, but a stable modernist poetics governs both beginning and end. Between the
Acts, set just before World War Two and written and published during the war, on the
other hand, expresses in its end a sharp skepticism about the future of both modernist
narrative that seems to point towards postmodernism: Miss La Trobe considers her
play a “failure” (209), while Isa ponders changes in the ontology of narrative: “Surely
it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes
. . .” (215). The novel’s final pages are marked by darkness, uncertainty,
contradictory thoughts, as the modern setting is transformed into the prehistoric
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