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249 Introduction 1. In the last few years, the field of modernism has undergone revision and expansion of its temporal and theoretical boundaries. See Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s review of the transformation of modernist studies in their essay “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48. 2. Patrick J. Quinn, Recharting the Thirties (Selinsgrove, Pa.: University of Susquehanna Press, 1996); Keith Williams and Steven Matthews, eds., Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After (London: Longman, 1997); Antony Shuttleworth, ed., And in Our Time: Vision, Revision, and British Writing of the 1930s (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Press, 2003); Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996); Phyllis Lassner, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own (New York: Macmillan, 1998); Maroula Joannou, ed., Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Judy Suh, Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Twentieth-Century British Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Other important studies include these: Janet Montefiore , Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, 1996); Karen Schneider, Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); Elaine Martin, ed., Gender, Patriarchy, and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). 3. For more on British fascism, see Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman, eds., Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2000); Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! (London: Cape, 2005); and Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). 4. In the past few decades, studies that explore the appeal of fascism—including those by Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Russell Berman, George Mosse, Zygmunt Bauman, Saul Friedländer, Slavoj Žižek, Dagmar Herzog, Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, Marion Kaplan, and the many other scholars I discuss in the following chapters— challenge and complicate the idea that German citizens were mesmerized masses that could be easily controlled by Hitler. The studies instead offer theories that point to the participation, voluntary choice, and even pleasure that many Germans derived from their participation in Nazism, as well as the historical and cultural contexts that paved the way for so many individuals to choose to ignore or even to participate in persecution in service of the greater nationalist vision of the Nazi Party. 5. In this manner they distinguish themselves from other antifascist modernist writnotes 250 notes to pages 12–17 ers of the period such as Naomi Mitchison, Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bottome, Rebecca West, and George Orwell. 6. Greenberg’s famous essay was first published in the Partisan Review in 1939 as a political response to Nazi suppression of modernist and avant-garde art as well as a comment on capitalist consumer culture. In more recent years, kitsch has become associated with postmodernism and “camp” sensibility, which may be interpreted as a self-conscious mode of social critique. For more on kitsch and camp sensibility, see chapter 4. 7. For an especially lucid summary of the variety of approaches to avant-garde aesthetics , fascism, and the political Left and Right, see Erin Carlston, Thinking Fascism : Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8–9. See also Judy Suh’s enlightening study on “middlebrow” fiction in relation to British fascist and antifascist movements. 8. Philip Rahv’s review, “The Taste of Nothing,” appeared in The New Masses (May 4, 1937): “It is not the doom of a world reeling to its destruction that Miss Barnes expresses, but those minute shudders of decadence developed in certain small in-grown cliques of intellectuals and their patrons, cliques in which the reciprocal workings of social decay and sexual perversion have destroyed all response to genuine values and actual things.” See Carlston, Thinking Fascism, 56, for her reference to Rahv. 9. In Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood mentions that when he and Stephen Spender saw Kameradshaft, a film about trapped coalminers in 1932, he had thought, “‘That makes Virginia Woolf look pretty silly.’ Stephen replied that he had been thinking something similar, though not specifically about Virginia” (CHK, 90). Woolf, for her part, refers to the writing of Isherwood and his contemporaries (W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Spender, Louis MacNeice)—whom she calls “leaning tower writers”— as “betwixt and between,” exhibiting “discomfort” and...