In this course we will follow the development of literary modernism in Britain, noting how the fiction (our primary object of study) and poetry (secondary object) of this period fashioned itself as a literature of transformation. We will focus on questions of representation: the issue of the relationship between art and reality, including how modern writers experimented with new techniques to represent minds and bodies. Part of this issue involves the notorious difficulty of modernist texts, and we analyze the challenges we encounter to understand why these writers were so preoccupied with finding new forms of representation. We will also examine the relationship between the major cultural transformations of this period and our readings. Readings will include James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier; Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; David Garnett, Lady Into Fox; Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall; short stories and a selection of poetry that will include World War I poets, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats.