Dreaming of Islam Among the Modernists of Sussex

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My research will explore the place and presence of Islam within selected works by Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, focusing in each case on their time in the County of Sussex. At the chronological centre of my research are two very particular events -namely the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and the founding of Saudi Arabia in 1932. These events and the huge attendant development in Western awareness of Islam at this time(Melman1992and Said 1993)had, I contend, an influence on Anglophone modernism that, though often secret or buried, is of great significance. This significance has not yet been fully investigated, and now, a hundred years on from 1922, the great year of modernism, is the time to do so. I have chosen to take, as my topographical focus, the County of Sussex because not only was it a place that each of my writers visited or lived in but it was, and is, emblematic of a vision of England(Featherstone2008), and indeed English modernism, not normally associated with Islam. My work will challenge these visions.