Parodists of History

Abstract Chapter 7 concludes by reflecting on the ways in which modernist writers felt compelled to respond to the parody that had come to define high modernist writing, having reached its apotheosis in Ulysses in general and ‘Oxen of the Sun’ in particular. It examines works by Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and Wyndham Lewis that reckon with the achievements of Joyce and other authors by presenting versions of their contemporary literary culture as culminating moments that are defined by their parodies of the past, and it explores how Joyce surpassed the parody of Ulysses in Finnegans Wake, showing how parody is not only fundamental to the genesis of modernist literature but also its sense of its historical situatedness and paradoxical modernity.