I feel that our house is the future as well as the past : Architecture, monumentality and form in the modernist novel

Questions of how literary modernism and literary realism can be distinguished from one another, particularly in the transitional period at the beginning of the twentieth century, are central concerns in the study of literature. I argue here that in E.M. Forster\u27s 1913 novel Howards End, the \u27monumentality\u27 of the titular house is the key to its inclusion in the modernist canon. This monumentality is incomplete, I claim, and as such formally replicates the impossibility of comprehending or representing modern life. I conclude with a similar reading of Elizabeth Bowen\u27s 1929 novel The Last September in order to demonstrate that this spatial dynamic of monumentality, which I posit as what I call a \u27mediating texture\u27 in the modernist novel, obtains beyond the confines of Forster\u27s novel