Micromodernism: Rethinking Literary Renewal in the Long 1930s (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture)

Micromodernism: Rethinking Literary Renewal in the Long 1930s (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture)

What is wrong with ‘literary modernism’ as a paradigm? One answer is that it is over-written, a kind of ‘winner’s history’ with a relatively narrow canon of innovative works, even including recent additions. Another is that it is a retrospective construction, rather than a term much used in its period. This book seeks to return to the scene of literary renewal, and to examine representative small groupings struggling, in the wake of the High Modernism of the 1920s, to articulate their own avant-garde ambitions in terms of politics, personal values, aesthetic categories, or continued allegiances to writers like Lawrence. In looking at microhistories, at literary beginnings and even at failure, we are forced to reexamine our mapping of modernism. A fascinating, wonderfully researched, lively study of neglected writers and milieux of the 1930–1950s, zooming in on microhistories, sites, occasions and trajectories. The attention to small magazines, to friendship networks and to experiential networks of relation is compelling, giving a wonderful sense of coterie, fugitive projects, New Grub Street moves and movements. ― Adam Piette, University of Sheffield Armstrong’s book is a timely riposte to big data approaches to modernism (i.e., network analysis and distant reading) and, in its commitment to the “transitory and relatively accidental” (p. 12), an inspired example of what Paul Saint-Amour calls “weak modernism.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. -- A. Porco, The University of North Carolina Wilmington ― CHOICE Tim Armstrong is Professor Emeritus at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature (2012), Modernism: A Cultural History (2005), Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (2000) and Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998), among other texts.