Reconstructing Modernism establishes for the first time the centrality of modernist buildings and architectural periodicals to British mid-century literature. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexplored architectural criticism by British authors, this book reveals how arguments about architecture led to innovations in literature, as well as to redesigns in the concept of modernism itself. While the city has long been a focus of literary modernist studies, architectural modernism has never had its due. Scholars usually characterize architectural modernism as a parallel modernism or even an incompatible modernism to literature. Giving special attention to dystopian classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this study argues that sustained attention to modern architecture shaped mid-century authors' political and aesthetic commitments. After many writers deemed modernist architects to be agents for communism and other collectivist movements, they squared themselves--and literary modernist detachment and aesthetic autonomy--against the seemingly tyrannical utopianism of modern architecture; literary aesthetic qualities were reclaimed as political qualities. In this way, Reconstructing Modernism redraws the boundaries of literary modernist studies: rather than simply adding to its canon, it argues that the responsibility for defining literary modernism for the mid-century public was shared by an incredible variety of authors--Edwardians, modernists, satirists, and even anti-modernists.
Author(s): Ashley Maher
Series: Oxford Mid-Century Studies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 288
City: New York
Cover
Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Brave New Worlds, Brave New Words, and Brave New Rooms
Early Modernist Utopianism: Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, and D.H. Lawrence
Reassessing Modernist Interdisciplinarity
Trajectories
1: Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future of Modernism
Initial Appreciations
The Threatened National Future
Decline and Fall
Growing Reservations: Frederick Etchells and Wyndham Lewis
2: Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism
Architecture and Governance
Brave New World, Eyeless in Gaza, and the Future of British Literature
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: World War II Draws the Dystopian Future Nearer
3: “Swastika arms of passage leading to nothing”: Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “New” Britain
The New Architecture and “The New Britain”
The New Britain and the Old Literary Modernisms
“The mischief was in her own and other rooms”: The Politicization of Architectural Style
“This did not look like home; but it looked like something—possibly a story”: Language and Architecture Intersect
“The thin air which had taken the house’s place”: Rethinking Modernism
4: Planning for War and Peace: Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and the Dystopian Documentary
Towards a New Britain: Modern Architecture at War
Documenting the Future: The British Documentary Movement and Things to Come
Betjeman’s Anti-Planning Documentaries and Literature
Orwell’s Leftist Anti-Planning
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Evelyn Waugh’s Near Future
Love Among the Ruins
Epilogue: Modernist Afterlives: J. G. Ballard’s “Handful Of Dust”
Bibliography
Index
