Piltdown, realism, and public trust in 1950s England
September 2022
|
Journal article
|
ELH
Opening with the 1953 exposure of the Piltdown hoax, and its surprisingly extensive and irreverent media reception, this essay argues that public trust in national institutions was among the pressing concerns of English culture throughout the 1950s, and a recurrent theme of its major realist fiction. Focusing on novels by Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, and Angus Wilson about fraud and forgery in institutional settings, the essay proposes that questions of motivated misrepresentation allowed novelists to emphasize partiality and prejudice in historical and literary narrative in ways that anticipated the reflexivity of both modes later in the century.
FFR
“Temporary Kings”; The Metropolitan novel series and the post-War consensus
June 2021
|
Journal article
|
MFS: Modern Fiction Studies
Focusing on Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, this essay discusses the representation of parliamentary politics in the long English novel series of the postwar settlement. It demonstrates how, through the openness to contingency built into its extended historical span, the then-popular novel sequence presented a formally distinctive opportunity to imagine political consensus and continuity in an age of marked national transformation.
FFR
Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic
January 2019
|
Book
Before his masterpiece The Rise of the Novel made him one of the most influential post-war British literary critics, Ian Watt was a soldier, a prisoner of war of the Japanese, and a forced labourer on the notorious Burma-Thailand Railway.
Both an intellectual biography and an intellectual history of the mid-century, this book reconstructs Watt's wartime world: these were harrowing years of mass death, deprivation, and terror, but also ones in which communities and institutions were improvised under the starkest of emergency conditions. Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic argues that many of our foundational stories about the novelabout the novel's origins and development, and about the social, moral, and psychological work that the novel accomplishescan be traced to the crises of the Second World War and its aftermath.
Literary Criticism
Muriel Spark and self-help
November 2018
|
Journal article
|
Textual Practice
Muriel Spark’s novels are full of characters who offer advice to live by – advice both good and bad. Focusing particularly on her fiction about girls and women, this essay reads this career-long feature of Spark's writing in relation to the mid-century publishing phenomenon of the self-help bestseller. It has been a truism at least since Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ that the modern novel has no wisdom to share with its readers, but this essay argues that both Spark’s narrative concern with mentorship and her stylistic recourse to the aphoristic mode reopen in a distinctive way the question of what secular truths the novel as a form can convey.
The modernist period was an era of world war and violent revolution. Covering a wide range of authors from Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy at the beginning of the period to Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett at the end, this book situates modernism's extraordinary literary achievements in their contexts of historical violence, while surveying the ways in which the relationships between modernism and conflict have been understood by readers and critics over the past fifty years. Ranging from the colonial conflicts of the late 19th century to the world wars and the civil wars in between, and concluding with the institutionalization of modernism in the Cold War, Modernism, War, and Violence provides a starting point for readers who are new to these topics and offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field for a more advanced audience.
Literary Criticism
The Modernist 'Novel'
January 2017
|
Chapter
|
The Cambridge History of Modernism
Literary Criticism
Between the Acts: Novels and other Mass Media
January 2016
|
Chapter
|
A Companion to Virginia Woolf
Citizenship and the English Novel in 1945
January 2016
|
Chapter
|
Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights
Anti-state fantasy and the fiction of the 1940s
May 2015
|
Journal article
|
Literature and History
This essay argues that the wartime institutionalisation of emergency governmental powers and the expectation of their continuance under a post-war socialist administration led to a pervasive anti-statism indistinguishable from anti-Communism in the mid-century British novel. Focusing on less-read dystopias of the period, Rex Warner's The Aerodrome (1941) and C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength (1945), I argue that these conservative novels are best understood as extreme iterations of a more widespread anxiety about the potentially totalitarian elements of a centralising and technocratic democracy at war.
C. S. Lewis, Rex Warner, totalitarianism, mid-century novel, SBTMR, dystopia, The Aerodrome, That Hideous Strength
Modernist Nostalgia/Nostalgia for Modernism: Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh
January 2013
|
Chapter
|
Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics
The Wartime Rise of The Rise of the Novel
June 2012
|
Journal article
|
Representations
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
The Novel and Thirty Years of War
January 2012
|
Chapter
|
The Cambridge History of the English Novel
Great Britain
January 2011
|
Chapter
|
The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel
November 2010
|
Book
Beginning its life as the sensational entertainment of the eighteenth century, the novel has become the major literary genre of modern times.
Literary Criticism
Resentments: The Politics and Pathologies of War Writing
January 2010
|
Chapter
|
Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War
Violence, Art, and War
January 2010
|
Chapter
|
The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms
“Is Your Journey Really Necessary?”: Going Nowhere in Late Modernist London
October 2009
|
Journal article
|
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II
January 2009
|
Book
Lyons, Michael J. World War II: A Short History. 4th edn. Prentice Hall, 2003.
Maddox, Robert James. The United States and World War II. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1992. Merridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the
Red Army, ...
Literary Criticism
World War II, the Welfare State, and Post-War 'Humanism'
January 2009
|
Chapter
|
The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel
Muriel Spark and the Meaning of Treason
September 2008
|
Journal article
|
MFS Modern Fiction Studies
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Modernism and World War II
January 2007
|
Book
In this full-length study of modernism and World War II, Marina MacKay offers historical readings of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, T. S. Eliot, Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh set against the dramatic background of national struggle and ...
Literary Criticism
British Fiction After Modernism The Novel at Mid-Century
January 2007
|
Book
This collection of essays offers a wide-ranging and provocative reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism.
Literary Criticism
Doing Business with Totalitaria: British Late Modernism and the Politics of Reputation
January 2006
|
Journal article
|
ELH
Putting the House in Order: Virginia Woolf and Blitz Modernism
June 2005
|
Journal article
|
Modern Language Quarterly
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4703 Language Studies, 4705 Literary Studies