Description
Book SynopsisAnalyses 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.
Trade ReviewWiseman's new book combines probing analysis of major canonical modernist authors with detailed scrutiny of critically overlooked interwar authors such as J. C. Powys and Mary Butts. This original project raises urgent questions about the cultural politics of space and place, and especially interwar fiction's intense engagement with, and representation of, 'wild', 'feral' or 'unhusbanded' localities on the fringes of the island nation. Wiseman shows that if there is a 'story' that these modernist authors repeatedly thematize in their fiction it is the existential repercussions of flight from, return to, the 'native'. Wiseman's astute emphasis on 'environmental description' will also prove suggestive to cultural historians who construe interwar literature through the critical prism of British neo-romanticism. -- Dr Andrew Radford
Table of Contents
- 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
