Through narrative and gender theories, this study deconstructs the gender-based assumptions we make in reading narratives, and Clifford focuses by way of example on the critical responses that have narrowly defined the fiction of D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway during the past 60 years.

Hemingway and Lawrence have been rigidly defined by formalists and feminists alike as overbearingly "masculine," and as a result, many critical readers dismiss their fiction as rather finite in its interpretive possibilities.

In addressing the gender-based assumptions made by readers of these modernist writers, this study re-evaluates the narrative desire of characters like Brett Ashley and Frederic Henry, Ursula Brangwen and Connie Chatterley, as they respond to the heroic centers of their narratives - whether those centers are characters who inhabit the novel or critical readers who enforce limited reading strategies.

By responding to the critical legacy surrounding these modernist texts, he reveals ways in which these novels and stories actually deny the limitations of a codified, heroic narrative.