Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

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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 tonon-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.