Without question, modernist texts have been haunted by what can be
known, or more aptly, what cannot be known. This position is
foundational to one of the pivotal readings of modernism.
Simultaneously, economic, legal, and political shifts that occurred
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced real
material changes pertaining to the status of women. Thus, as many others
have adeptly argued, modernism is also a crisis in gender. Modernism,
Metaphysics, and Sexuality keenly suggests that these narratives - the
thinking of what constitutes truth and the rethinking of gender - are
intertwined. Interpreting Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Victory,
Forster's A Passage to India and Maurice, Lawrence's Women in Love, and
Woolf's A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse through Luce
Irigaray's rereading of western metaphysics, Raschke suggests that where
there is a crisis in knowing, there is also a crisis in gender.