Modernism's family values: Genealogy, kinship and form in modern narrative (James Joyce, Ireland, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Scotland, Marcel Proust, France)

Modernism's Family Values investigates the relationship between modernist prose and the family. The radical innovations in narrative and linguistic form in the early twentieth-century novel coincides with a wholesale abandonment of the family plots of marriage and paternity which were for so long intrinsic to its structure. The dissertation draws a connection between the two phenomena, arguing that the formal strategies of modernism reflect an affiliative, non-genealogical understanding of kinship, continuity and transmission.; After an introduction examining the ambivalent and anxious attitude toward genealogical narrative in Dickens, I demonstrate how the illegitimate conjunctions undone by the Dickensian genealogical denouement---the random encounter, the homosexual coupling, the criminal fraternity, the stranger in the house---are re-cast as legitimate templates of social relations and intergenerational transmission, and are rendered generative, not degenerative, possibilities.; The first chapter reads Sherlock Holmes as a mediating figure between the automatic, "natural" relationships of the and the contingent, "unnatural" bond with the stranger that constitutes, I argue, the fundamental productive relationship of modernist narrative. Chapters two and three demonstrate how, contrary to popular strains of analysis, Ulysses is neither a re-discovery nor a wreckage of Victorian family values, but is a work structured by a profoundly alternative ideology of kinship, a queer family epic. I argue that the two anticipated meetings which provide its narrative "engine" displace the marriage and foundling plots, and that the formal architecture and stylistic innovations of the novel are predicated on a contingent, non-genealogical model of kinship and ancestry.; Chapter four looks at the competing models of relations across Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu. The "straight" axis of paternity, represented by the mother's kiss, is displaced in the Recherche by the "bent" lines of homosexuality and avuncularity, brought together in the telling expression 'la race des tantes '. I argue that, the adoptive uncles and aunts of the novel (Swann, Leonie), offer an oblique, indirect angle of succession. In the same way, the hidden civilisations of Sodom and Gomorrah, with their mysterious and contingent systems of induction and perpetuation, constitute a figure for an alternative mode of social relations and transmission.