"Cool modernism has always been the most informal. In Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900-1940, Gaurav Majumdar brilliantly limns this informality as a crucial philosophic, ethical and even geopolitical issue. On the one hand, modernist informality celebrates new forms of intimacy: informal styles are ripostes to the Lockean western liberal consensus, one-upping canonical ideas of freedom and of (informal, rule-breaking) individual choice. On the other, engaging with the new critique of planetary modernisms, Majumdar also shows how the modernists’ informality is key to their political impact. Ranging from Mansfield to W.H Auden, both supremely ‘informal’ writers, the book centers on the ostentatious informality of Woolf, Joyce and Eliot. Gracefully written, coolly informal: Gaurav Majumdar here reveals to us one feature of modernism we should never take for granted. This is a thought-provoking and exciting reappraisal."Enda Duffy, Professor, English, UC Santa Barbara
