Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (review)

“Intermodernism” names what has otherwise been called late modernism, “the 1930’s,” post-war literature, and the no man’s land between modernism and postmodernism. Inter in these many ways, “intermodernism” entails a new literary history, one in which these minor designations give way to a major claim to a truly distinctive set of cultural interventions. Intermodernism is far from a lull between storms of creative activity; it intervenes with force enough to make us reconsider what it comes between—not just the modern and the postmodern, but a whole range of opposites it would usefully resolve. Elite and common; social and aesthetic; abstract and realistic; experimental and popular: these are some of the dilemmas undone in intermodernism, which, as Kristin Bluemel defines it, redefines the very bases of twentieth-century literary culture. Modernism has dominated not only our literary histories but our ascriptions of value, our institutional priorities, and our tastes in reading. The effect has been to distort, neglect, and trivialize most of what made twentieth-century literary culture vital and important. “Intermodernism,” conversely, opens up all areas of inquiry and appreciation, naming a dynamic, flexible form of attention to what truly made literature so inventive, so useful, and so perplexing in these years.

Bluemel’s powerful, passionate introduction to Intermodernism makes these claims and specifies five features that define this new field. First of all, “intermodernism” designates not just a new historical period but a certain style of engagement, a radical eccentricity similar to that pursued in modernist innovation but centered upon work, community, and other aspects of social commitment. Intermodernism is an ideology. Next, it is functional: just as its writers had practical interests, it serves a practical purpose by transforming our theoretical and institutional practices, opening up new opportunities for the work scholars do. It is a postmodern invention, both because it is seen from our posterior moment and because its theorization accords with postmodern dynamics. It is not just for literary scholars and it is not just a British phenomenon. It may start with scholarly work on neglected mid-century British writers, but it applies to any and all artists who come between the modern and the postmodern, the aesthetic and the social, high and low.

These five defining qualities and objectives make the critical project of intermodernism an exciting new recovery effort. Not only does it remedy neglect of a great number of important writers, it recovers “the web of personal and professional relations that sustained Britain during the dark years of 1930s Depression, 1940s war and 1950s reconstruction” (14); it rediscovers a culture lost between ideological commitments and restores to us the great value, pleasure, and usefulness of work that had been meant to sustain us.

Each of this book’s contributors explicitly makes the case for intermodernism while also filling in the detail on writers, relationships, and phenomena that intermodernism enables us now to appreciate. Laura Marcus discusses the documentary movement of the 1930s as it was promoted by John Grierson and Paul Rotha as well as articles published in the largely forgotten journal Cinema Quarterly from 1932 to 1935. Marcus proves that collaborations and conflicts between cinema and literature in these years were crucial to the formation of aesthetic, political, and cultural categories critical to twentieth-century culture. This discovery validates the claim for intermodernism as distinct from either modernism or postmodernism: here, the documentary impulse did not come after modernist aestheticism but instead shaped a modernism that persisted into activities joining aesthetic and realist imperatives. Also effective in arguing for intermodernism is John Fordham’s fine article on region and class in the novels of Harold Heslop. Fordham claims that the industrial novels of the interwar years develop spatial forms that are neither modern nor postmodern but are experimental, nevertheless. These novels are not simply traditional in their return to regional communities. Rather, their innovative designs upon social being make them distinctively forward-looking. Like Marcus, Fordham proves that...