May Sinclair

This monograph brings together the most recent research on Sinclair and re-contextualises her work both within and against dominant Modernist narratives. It explores Sinclair’s negotiations between the public and private, the cerebral and the corporeal and the spiritual and the profane in both her fiction and non-fiction. The essays contained in this volume are grouped under two sections entitled ‘The Abstract Intellect’ and ‘Abject Bodies’. They each address the various ways in which Sinclair endeavoured to formulate aesthetic techniques through which the subjective, physical and intellectual experience of ‘reality’ might be represented. Together, the two sections of the monograph investigate the many fruitful connections between Sinclair’s fictional, critical and philosophical output and the structures of epochal change traditionally associated with literary Modernism. They focus in particular upon Sinclair’s engagement with early-twentieth century cultural changes in perceptions of the construction and representation of the human subject. Such interrogations were made possible through contemporaneous shifts in humanist beliefs about subjective construction following thinkers like Freud, who theorized humans as constructs of unconscious drives and desires. Ultimately, the essays and the volume as a whole conclude that Sinclair’s work might be viewed in this context as a radical ontological challenge to traditional assumptions about what it means to be human.