Intermodernism

by Kristin Bluemel

These 10 original critical essays examine the fascinating writing of the Depression and World War II. Divided into four sections--Work, Community,War, and Documents--the volume focuses on texts that are typically ignored in accounts of modernism or The Auden Generation.Chapters examine writing by Elizabeth Bowen, Storm Jameson, William Empson, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, Harold Heslop, T. H. White, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, John Grierson, Margery Allingham and Stella Gibbons. These authors were politically radical, or radically 'eccentric', and tended to be committed to working- and middle-class cultures, non-canonical genres, such as crime and fantasy, and minority forms of narrative, such as journalism, manifestos, film, and travel narratives, as well as novels. The volume supports further research with an appendix, 'Who Were the Intermodernists?', a listing of archival sources and an extensive bibliography.

Genres: Literary Criticism

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 5, 2009

About the author

Kristin Bluemel is professor of English and the Wayne D. McMurray and Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University. She is author of George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London; editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain; and coeditor of Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention. Her research for Enchanted Wood was supported by a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at Newcastle University and a Publication Grant of The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

This collection of essays calls attention to British writers who are seen as neither modernist nor post-modernist but instead intermodern, looking both back and forward. Kristin Bluemel’s useful introduction suggests that class and literary genre are both defining features of intermodernist writers, who often choose to work outside canonical expectations. Individual essays provide good examples: Janet Montefiore compares unconventional historical novels by Elizabeth Townsend Warner and T. H. White; Phyllis Lassner looks at World War II spy thrillers by Margery Allingham and Helen MacInnes; and Nick Hubble explores the work of the Mass-Observation movement (and William Empson’s involvement in it), which makes me think of Twitter today. Novels by Stella Gibbons and Elizabeth Bowen are also shown to be intermodern in essays by Faye Hammill and Allan Hepburn. An appendix lists many other writers who might be seen through this lens, and Bluemel encourages readers to continue the work.