Intermodernism

Kristin Bluemel is Professor of English and Wayne D. McMurray Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University in New Jersey. She is the author of books on modernist Dorothy Richardson and intermodernist George Orwell; articles and chapters on regional and middlebrow writers; editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (EUP, 2011), and past editor of the journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. Her work in progress examines interwar women wood engravers.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction: What is Intermodernism?, Kristin Bluemel; Part I: Work; 1. A Cassandra with Clout: Storm Jameson, Little Englander and Good European,Elizabeth Maslen; 2. Englands Ancient and Modern: Sylvia Townsend Warner, T. H. White and the Fictions of Medieval Englishness, Janet Montefiore; 3. 'A Strange Field': Region and Class in the Novels of Harold Heslop, John Fordham; Part II: Community; 4. Stella Gibbons, Ex-Centricity and the Suburb, Faye Hammill; 5. Intermodern Travel: J. B. Priestley's English and American Journeys, Lisa Colletta; Part III: War; 6. Under Suspicion: The Plotting of Britain in World War II Detective Spy Fiction,Phyllis Lassner; 7. Trials and Errors: The Heat of the Day and Postwar Culpability,Allan Hepburn; 8. Rebecca West's Palimpsestic Praxis: Crafting the Intermodern Voice of Witness, Debra Rae Cohen; Part IV: Documents; 9. The Intermodern Assumption of the Future: William Empson, Charles Madge and Mass-Observation, Nick Hubble; 10. 'The creative treatment of actuality': John Grierson, Documentary Cinema and 'Fact' in the 1930s, Laura Marcus; Appendix: Who Are the Intermodernists?; Select Bibliography; Notes on Contributors; Index.

This collection offers more than a series of case studies illustrating what Bluemel (Monmouth Univ.) calls "intermodernism." It creates a new paradigm for the study of 20th-century literature and culture. Building on her own George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics (CH, Sep'05, 43-0148), the editor brings together major scholars of 1930s-40s Britain under the rubric of intermodernism, defined in her compelling introductory essay as an aesthetic, institutional, and ideological category meant to delineate the space between modernism and postmodernism and to serve as a critical tool … The extensive bibliography and appendix ("Who Are the Intermodernists?") will facilitate further research, especially by including the locations of archival material … Highly recommended.