Treating the connections between literature and its cultural and material contexts, "Challenging Modernism" concentrates on English and American responses to the interwar European terrain. In a range of essays, the contributors examine 20th-century writers' deployment of contemporary political, imperialist and nationalist discourses to define Self and Other along new lines; they probe writers' engagement with such issues as sexual reproduction and the fate of workers on the British World War II home front. Setting both canonical works of literature and previously overlooked texts in freshly examined cultural and historical contexts, they revisit modernism to expose new facets of its political, cultural and sexual struggles.