Realism, Late Modernist Abstraction, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Fictions of Impersonality

"As the photographer does," asserted Storm Jameson in 1937, "so the writer must keep himself out of the picture while working ceaselessly to present the fact." It was this same subversion of authorial subjectivity which assumed a radically new guise for late modernist women writers of the 1930s and 1940s such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, when they redressed novelistic experiment to find pragmatic and uncompromising ways of effecting an urgently needed historicizing critique of developing Fascism in Europe. Expanding the creative and critical efficacy of "realist" fiction itself as another world war loomed, it was Warner who actively engaged with the stylization of documentary and externalism by re-envisioning narrative impersonality.