Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-twentieth-century Britain

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.