Intermodernism

To cite this article: Kristin Bluemel & Phyllis Lassner "Feminist inter/Modernist studies." Feminist Modernist Studies. 1:1-2 (2018): 22-35. Taylor and Francis Online 14 November 2018 <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24692921.2017.1380777>

Chapter 10 in James Smith's edited Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s.
Rural literature of Britain is a subgenre of British regional literature and regional literature is a subgenre of national literature. This chapter examines some of the most widely read and most intensely beloved of rural regional novels, lying at the intersection of these three literary traditions: those by H. E. Bates about the Midlands, Winifred Holtby about coastal Yorkshire, Richard Llewellyn about South Wales, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon about the Mearns of Scotland. Novels by these writers contest a southeast England rural ideal sustained by 1930s ‘high-brow’ late modernist novels and ‘low-brow’ mass marketed country propaganda. Instead of the modernist flâneur looking at his reflection in windows or the urban motorist looking at rural scenes selected by guidebooks, rural regional novels adopt the continuous gaze of the worker surveying the land slowly. These workers see land rather than landscape, their vision determined not by aesthetic categories but rather by economic or cultural demands and priorities. Recent theorizations of romantic moderns, the commodified authentic, and rural modernity, discussed at the conclusion of this chapter, invite comparative literary readings of these rural regional characters into the mainstream of critical discourse about twentieth-century British literature and national self-fashioning.

Conference Paper:
Evelyn Waugh and Daphne du Maurier’s most beloved creations prominently feature the English country house as a locus of a past that refuses to be forgotten. The beginning of Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Rebecca (1938) presents a bleak image of a dull present, devoid of individuality and colour. The uninspiring present is contrasted throughout with the remarkable recent past. Both novels open with a sleeping protagonist dreaming of their privileged outsider’s perspective of ‘an exquisite man-made landscape’ (Brideshead 25). Yet the dream is in constant danger of tipping over the abyss into the realm of nightmares. Brideshead and Manderley reflect their creators’ ambiguous fascination with the big house. In their autobiographical writings Du Maurier [Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer (1977)] and Waugh [A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography (1964)] reimagine the country house as a synecdoche of England’s cultural international standing. These autobiographies outline the effect that early encounters with the structure of the country house had on them. Waugh’s fascination with the bric-a-brac housed in his aunts’ estate reflects his conservative nostalgia for a diminishing British Empire. His regrets the disappearance of an ordered, stratified and, for him, beautiful society and berates the void that is replacing it. Du Maurier’s recollections of her childhood visits to Milton House lead her to question the nature of time and history-making. It is not the things that the house contains that draws her, but the actual structure of the building. In her gothic appreciation of the big house the walls contain the ghost of yesterday.  For both writers, the English country house not only acts as a vibrant literary trope that gives voice to concerns for their country’s current political and moral climate; it is also a desired abode where these intensely private people can escape their public.

Chapter 9 in Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's edited volume in the Cambridge Literature in Transition series (General Editor: Gill Plain).
British documentary and British literature became part of the same conversation about nation and location in the documentary literature of the 1930s. Many authors infused the narrative genres of the novel and short story and memoir with styles and techniques of documentary journalism and film. This chapter argues that a popular 1930s literature of fictionalized fact, serving the purpose of social healing and national reimagining, is an exemplary intermodern genre. Adopting as case studies George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934), it maps the dominant characteristics of this genre, charting similarities of Orwell’s and Priestley’s contexts, motives, techniques, subjects and politics. The chapter then contrasts the two writers’ rhetorics of place to suggest that Orwell’s narrative suppresses names of locations so that his readers are discouraged from imagining themselves traveling along any one of the many roads to Wigan. This creates problems of social distance that Priestley solves through his different treatment of domestic geography. Priestley, a Yorkshireman, provides an alternative climax for the story about documentary and literature in the interwar years. Yet Priestley himself depends on an unlikely source, the travel and ramble literature of the 1920s, in particular H. V. Morton’s In Search of Wales (1932). This chapter concludes that this earlier travel literature, often dismissed as cozy, conservative, and conformist, should frame our understanding of the different possible national meanings that emerge in 1930s documentary literature through writers’ deployments of facts of place.
Key words: documentary, intermodernism, travel writing, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, H. V. Morton.

In late 1930s Britain a growing movement advocated for the artists’ lithograph as a way to make modern art affordable to ‘every purse’ and available in ‘every home’ (to quote contemporary phrases).  The domestic encounter with original, contemporary art was seen to have a value which the museum object could not match.  A concrete manifestation of this movement came with the Everyman Prints, published by the Artists’ International Association in 1940.  The series included works by artists such as Vanessa Bell, John Piper and Carel Weight and impressions were available for a few pence from travelling exhibitions, as well as over the counter at Marks and Spencer.  Some contemporaries interpreted the Everyman Prints as catering to a working-class audience with a stress on social (or socialist) realism, and this understanding has been adopted by subsequent scholars.  However, In this paper I suggest that the primary audience was less ‘every’ householder than the young and aspirational, those who saw themselves creating a ‘modern home’, in the words of the series brochure, despite restricted means, through access to new technologies of reproduction for books, music and art.  I argue that the initiative can be understood as an example in visual art of the ‘intermodern’, that is the pre-war cultural position identified by literary scholars such as Kristin Bluemel and Nick Hubble as a coalescence of progressive sections of the (lower) middle-class - and their political values - and aesthetic interests derived from modernism.  In summary, attention to the Everyman Prints – and the wider movement they represented – shows how the apparently private space of the pre-war home could also be, for some, a place where an individual’s combined commitments to modernism and to a progressive politics were affirmed.

Sherlockian scholarship is a display of intellect, wit, and canonical expertise that requires a cunning manipulation of a story world and of nonfiction. This playful style of writing defies easy classification in the terminology of fan and literary studies. Emerging in the early 20th century, Sherlockian scholarship had a tremendous surge in popularity in the late 1920s and early '30s in articles by renowned British and American authors, including Dorothy L. Sayers, Christopher Morley, Sir Desmond MacCarthy, Sir Sydney Castle Roberts, and Ronald A. Knox. The sustained popularity of Sherlockian scholarship owes much to these initial players, whose sparkling prose conjures a bygone era of repartee. In this study, I present a chronological survey of two early periods in Sherlockian scholarship to understand its poetics, popularity, generic identity, and contemporary relevance.