This chapter is very similar to a chapter in Frost's later publication, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (2013), which is listed separately in this database.
The Sheik has a surprisingly prominent place in some of the most significant formulations of British modernism by key critics, for whom Hull was not just a bad writer and The Sheik not merely a bad novel but a chief representative of cultural degeneracy.
This essay will examine the modernist critique of aesthetic and political "badness" through Hull and one of her most important critics: D. H. Lawrence. (96)
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The case of Lawrence and Hull suggests that "clichéd" popular fictions underpin modernism's supposedly "innovative" representations of sexuality and eroticism in spite of the modernist repudiation of this "badness." Ultimately, the modernist turn to "bad" fiction raises a more fundamental question of whether erotic fantasy, by its very nature, may elude the much-prized modernist value of innovation. (98)
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In a rare moment of genre distinction, Leavis argues that reading "novels like The Way of an Eagle, The Sheik, [and] The Blue Lagoon" [...] constitutes "a more detrimental diet than the detective story in so far as a habit of fantasying will lead to maladjustment in actual life" (55). Presumably, one could put the deductive method of detection to use in real life, while the "fantasying" of romance novels lacks such application. While Leavis never substantiates this claim of Madame Bovary-like corruption, romance is the genre on which her argument about the connection between cliché and fantasy leans most heavily, and The Sheik is one of the central pillars. (103)
This chapter is very similar to a chapter in Frost's later publication, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (2013), which is listed separately in this database.
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