SOURCE: “The (En)gendering of Literary History,” in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1989, pp. 111–20.

In the following essay, Caughie contrasts Gubar and Gilbert's The War of Words—which explains modernism as a male reaction against the appearance of women writers—with Michael H. Levinson's A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922.

Engender: 1. Of the male parent: To beget; “Thanne sholde he take a yong wyf and a feir / On which he myghte engendre hym an heir” (The Merchant's Tale, 28–29); 2. Of the female parent: To conceive, bear; “O Error, soon conceived, / Thou never coms't unto a happy birth, / But kill'st the mother that engend'red thee!”

(Julius Caesar, V, iii, 70–72)

The making of the modern has become a critical preoccupation in recent works, both as a subject (how modernism was made by its practitioners) and as an ideology (how modernism has been and will...