Modernism’s most contentious rivals, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, were polar opposites–stylistically, personally, and professionally–yet their lives, works, and careers bear striking similarities. They shared the same literary agent, published in the same literary magazines, fought legal battles against censorship, and were both pirated by Samuel Roth. This is the first book to explore the resonances between the two writers, shattering the historical silence between Joyceans and Lawrentians.

The parallels run deep between these epic figures of the literary canon, and this volume explores the classic modernist paradoxes shared by the two writers. Both were at once syncretists and shatterers, bourgeois cosmopolitans, prudish libertines, displaced nostalgists, and rebels against their native lands. Considering mutual themes such as gender, class, horseracing, nature, religion, exile, and modernism’s fascination with Egyptology, these essays highlight the many intersections in the major novels and short fiction of Joyce and Lawrence. Modernists at Odds is a long overdue extended comparison of two of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century.