The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism
Publisher： Liverpool University Press
Publication year： 2015
E-ISBN: 9781942954019
P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780990895886
Subject： I06 Literature, Literature Appreciation
Language：
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Description
The work of English modernists in the 1920s and 1930s – particularly D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf – often expresses a fundamental ambivalence towards the social, cultural and technological developments of the period. These writers collectively embody the tensions and contradictions which infiltrate English modernism as the interwar period progresses, combining a profound sense of attachment to rural place and traditions with a similarly strong attraction to metropolitan modernity – the latter being associated with transience, possibility, literary innovation, cosmopolitanism, and new developments in technology and transportation. In this book, Sam Wiseman analyses key texts by these four authors, charting their respective attempts to forge new identities, perspectives and literary approaches that reconcile tradition and modernity, belonging and exploration, the rural and the metropolitan. This analysis is located within the context of ongoing critical debates regarding the relationship of English modernism with place, cosmopolitanism, and rural tradition; Wiseman augments this discourse by highlighting stylistic and thematic connections between the authors in question, and argues that these links collectively illustrate a distinctive, place-oriented strand of interwar modernism. Ecocritical and phenomenological perspectives are deployed to reveal similarities in their sense of human interrelationship with place, and a shared interest in particular themes and imagery; these include archaeological excavation, aerial perspectives upon place, and animism. Such concerns stem from specific technological and socio-cultural developments of the era. The differing engagements of these four authors with such changes collectively indicate a distinctive set of literary strategies, which aim to reconcile the tensions and contradictions inherent in their relationships with place. Introduction: Regions, Revenants, Reimaginings 1. Strange Old Feelings Wake in the Soul: Ambivalent Landscapes in D.H. Lawrence 2. The Pen of a Traveller, the Ink-Blood of Home: John Cowper Powys’ Imaginative Realism 3. In Two Worlds at Once: Animism, Borders and Liminality in Mary Butts 4. All Boundaries Are Lost: Travel, Fragmentation and Interconnection in Virginia Woolf Conclusion: Expanding Modernist Communities Bibliography Index Author's previous books: Assembling Identities (editor), Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014. Analyses key texts by D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf, charting their respective attempts to forge new identities, perspectives and literary approaches that reconcile tradition and modernity, belonging and exploration, the rural and the metropolitan. Emphasizes its subjects’ similarities in terms of their sense of attachment to rural place and traditions, and their equally powerful interest in modernity. Draws upon studies of interwar nativism and the ‘anthropological turn’. Identifies continuities across representations of rural and urban experience throughout the interwar period. Argues that cosmopolitan sensibilities in the interwar period are transmuted into new ways of depicting landscape, flora and fauna. Competitive titles: Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010; £19.99). This book emphasizes the relationship between Woolf’s late writing (particularly Between the Acts) and her
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