The question 'What is modernism?' has provoked intense critical discussion. A Route to Modernism explores this area; it focuses on the strange and dangerous journey taken by Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf towards unknown regions of the mind and the universe. In a discussion of these novelists, both individually and in relation to one another, a radical reconsideration of modernism is developed. Woolf envisaged her contemporaries 'flashing past on another railway line'. A Route to Modernism shows the hypothetical train of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf not following an existing track but tunnelling beneath surfaces, following routes which are 'spasmodic, fragmentary', sometimes taking off like a rocket into the cosmos. Their fragmented, modernist works deny us 'the comfort of ... a single meaning, either in works of art or in the world'. This book offers new approaches to modernism, while insisting on books being left 'open - no conclusion come to '.

ROSEMARY SUMNER, prior to her retirement, was a senior lecturer in English at Goldsmith College, London University (1959-89). Her previous works include Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, William Golding's `The Spire', and essays in various collections and academic journals.

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Abbreviations Preface Introduction The Experimental and the Absurd in Two on a Tower Some Surrealist Elements in Hardy's Prose and Verse Chance and Indeterminacy in Hardy's Novels and Poetry Discoveries of Dissonance: Hardy's Late Fiction The Well-Beloved: A Modernist Experiment? Hardy and Lawrence: the Adventure to the Unknown The Rainbow: 'Anna Victrix'; the Dance of the Stacks Women in Love: Towards Harmony?: A Language for 'the Whole Man Alive' Woolf and Lawrence: Harmony and Dissonance; 'The Thing That Exists When We Aren't There' Hardy to Woolf: A Route to Modernism 'Books Open: No conclusion Come To' Notes Bibliography Index