Early 20th-century literature and social sciences contested with one another over gender formations. While social sciences created taxonomies of normalised and medicalised difference, modernist literature simultaneously validated the autonomous particular that defies categorization.

Characters as gender misfits countered an imposed social science model, instead emphasising individuality. Close readings from the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, W.D. Yeats and Stevie Smith document this literary struggle with the contemporaneous social sciences.

Part of the 'American Perspectives' Fulbright Series.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/cultural-misfits-gender-in-early-twentieth-century-literature

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