Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War
Cedric Van Dijck
£19.99
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture
MicromodernismRethinking Literary Renewal in the Long 1930s
£24.99
Out of stock
About this book
Rethinks modernism as a category by focusing on little-known late-modernist groupings of authors
- Awarded 2025 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice
- Investigates forms of innovation outside our usual understanding of ‘modernism’
- Offers microhistories of small avant-garde groupings
- Considered neglected authors and literary failure as intrinsic to the story of ‘modernism’
- Asks us to reconsider ‘modernism’ as a category
What is wrong with ‘literary modernism’ as a paradigm? One answer is that it is over-written, a kind of ‘winner’s history’ with a relatively narrow canon of innovative works, even including recent additions. Another is that it is a retrospective construction, rather than a term much used in its period. This book seeks to return to the scene of literary renewal, and to examine representative small groupings struggling, in the wake of the High Modernism of the 1920s, to articulate their own avant-garde ambitions in terms of politics, personal values, aesthetic categories, or continued allegiances to writers like Lawrence. In looking at microhistories, at literary beginnings and even at failure, we are forced to reexamine our mapping of modernism.
Reviews
A fascinating, wonderfully researched, lively study of neglected writers and milieux of the 1930–1950s, zooming in on microhistories, sites, occasions and trajectories. The attention to small magazines, to friendship networks and to experiential networks of relation is compelling, giving a wonderful sense of coterie, fugitive projects, New Grub Street moves and movements.
Armstrong’s book is a timely riposte to big data approaches to modernism (i.e., network analysis and distant reading) and, in its commitment to the “transitory and relatively accidental” (p. 12), an inspired example of what Paul Saint-Amour calls “weak modernism.”
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
Table of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Series Editors’ Preface
Introduction
1. Antipodean Exits
2. Red Lion Street: Modernism as Provocation
3. Hammersmith Modernism: Collaboration, Finality, Letters
4. Social Credit Modernism
5. Proems: Ambition’s Empty Vessel
6. The New Apocalypse: The Lonely Avant-garde
7. Eithne Wilkins: Modernism and Global War
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
