We Speak a Different Tongue

We Speak a Different Tongue: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890–1939 challenges the critical practice of privileging modernism. In so doing, the volume makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates about re-visioning literary modernism, questioning its canon, and challenging its aesthetic parameters. By utilizing the term “modernity” rather than “modernism”, the 16 essays housed in this volume foreground the writers who have been marginalised by both their contemporary modernist writers and literary scholars, while exploring the way in which these authors responded to the tensions, disruptions and challenges of modernity through the expansion of subject matter or through formal innovations that are not always consonant with those associated with modernist experimentation. At the same time, the essays collected here incorporate alternative perspectives within modernist practice itself while examining the late-modernist writers whose work may, in some aspects, resonate with earlier modernist experimentation, but also may be decidedly distinct from it. Beginning with discussion on modernity and its relation to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century social and political context, the volume covers a wide range of the authors, from the well-known, like Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Victoria Cross, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, and D. H. Lawrence, and rebelling female mavericks, May Sinclair, Charlotte Mew, Vita Sackville West, and Djuna Barnes, to lesser-known writers such as Rayner Heppenstall and Jean Toomer.