Localizing Late Modernism: Interwar Regionalism and the Genesis of the “Micro Novel”

A recent revisionary focus for the so-called new modernist studies has been the relationship between high modernism and formal preoccupations of interwar novelists who followed in its wake. This essay, contributing to this ongoing work about the distinctive innovations of late-modernist writing, considers British women writers who extended the heritage of the regional novel while accommodating the ambitions of modernist experimentalism. Although assumptions about the retrogressive nature of fiction from the 1930s and 40s—including its relegation of stylistic virtuosity in favor of social commentary, its supposed affinity with Victorian classic realism, and its concomitant resistance to subjectivity-centered techniques of interiority and indirectness—have come under scrutiny by reassessments of the period, what is less well recognized, let alone analyzed, is the extent to which such different writers as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Storm Jameson, and Rosamond Lehmann capitalized on the advancements of their modernist-Impressionist precursors to develop new modes for engagement with provincial environments.