This collection of original essays challenges readers to accept a new term, critical category, and literary history of twentieth-century British literature. Focusing on the fiction, memoirs, criticism, and journalism of such writers as Elizabeth Bowen, Storm Jameson, William Empson, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, Harold Heslop, T. H. White, Rebecca West, John Grierson, Margery Allingham, and Stella Gibbons, essays distinguish these writers' literary efforts from those of the modernists and postmodernists. They expose the web of historical, institutional, and personal relationships that together define intermodernism.
The book identifies three kinds of features that are typically ignored in accounts of modernism or the Auden generation: cultural (intermodernists typically represent the working-class and working middle-class); political (intermodernists are radical, or "radically eccentric"); and literary (intermodernists are committed to non-canonical, even "middlebrow" or "mass" genres). To encourage future scholarship on intermodernism, the volume concludes with an appendix, "Who Were the Intermodernists?", and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Edinburgh University Press

Bluemel, Kristin

Polygon

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Edinburgh, cop. 2009

1, PT, 2011

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.

This collection of original critical essays, newly available in paperback, launches an ambitious, long-term project marking out a new period and style in twentieth-century literary history.

vii, 254 p. ; 24 cm
Originally published: 2009
Includes bibliographical references and index

2023-06-28