Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914-45

For many years, modernism and the Auden generation of the 1930s were the categories that shaped our view of the important and serious literature of this period. Recent criticism, however, especially feminism, cultural criticism, and new historicism, has begun to address this partial and slanted literary history. The essays in Challenging Modernism grow out of a gathering consensus that only a fuller spectrum of early twentieth-century literature can claim to illuminate this period and that judgment of what constitutes important literature ought to include analysis of the cultural and political dimensions of imaginative literature.Treating the connections between literature and its cultural and material contexts, Challenging Modernism concentrates on English and American responses to the interwar European terrain. In a range of essays, the contributors examine twentieth-century writers' deployment of contemporary political, imperialist, and nationalist discourses to define Self and Other along new lines; they probe writers' engagement with such issues as sexual reproduction and the fate of workers on the British World War II home front. Setting both canonical works of literature and previously overlooked texts in freshly examined cultural and historical contexts, they revisit modernism to expose new facets of its political, cultural and sexual struggles. Works covered include Stevie Smith's Over the Frontier; Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Ford's Zeppelin Nights; Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets; E.H. Young's William; Kay Boyle's Death of a Man; and Leonora Carrington's The Debutante. Contributors also look at Inez Holden's World War II fiction, T.S. Eliot's journalism, and the work of popular writers Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke.The essays in Challenging Modernism are responses to the call for more rigorous, historically grounded approaches to the literature and culture of the interwar years. By demonstrating the engagement of previously undervalued writers with urgent social and political questions, by setting well-known figures within new cultural and historical contexts, and by newly identifying key cultural movements, these essays participate in the recent critical revolution illuminating the complex production of knowledge and culture during the first half of the century.