"The writers who are the focus of this study - Lawrence, Woolf, Bennett, Conrad, Forster, Galsworthy, and James - either admired Dostoevsky or feared him as monster who might dissolve all literary and cultural distinctions. Though their responses differed greatly, these writers were unanimous in their inability to recognize Dostoevsky as a literary artist. They viewed him instead as a psychologist, a mystic, a prophet, and, in the cases of Lawrence and Conrad, a hated rival who compelled creative response. This study constructs a map of English modernist novelists' misreadings of Dostoevsky, and in so doing it illuminates their aesthetic and cultural values and the nature of the modern English novel."
"This book examines how seven major English novelists - D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Henry James, and John Galsworthy - responded to the work of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky in the early years of the twentieth century."@en