Description: Considers relationships between modernist literature and literary criticism and argues that new modernist fiction can bring with it new modes of reading.
Brief description: Elizabeth Pender has taught English Literature at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge and has published articles in Modernism/modernity and Critical Quarterly. The collection Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (2019) was co-edited with Cathryn Setz.
Review Quotes: Elizabeth Pender's splendid close readings show how the novels of Barnes, Loy and Rodker express an oblique relation to the "canonical" modernism from which they emerged. Prizing style above structure and using allusion to create poetic density rather than to celebrate tradition, these "new modernists" propose exciting new ways to read twentieth-century fiction.--Peter Nicholls, New York University