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Bluemel, Kristin. George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. New York & London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xi + 246 pp. £45. ISBN 1–4039–6510–2, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 3, JULY 2007, Pages 317–318, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm015
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Extract
This book makes a welcome demand for a reconceptualisation of the categories through which British literature of the 1930s and 1940s has customarily been understood. After explaining the inability of “modernism” to account for much of the literary output of this period, especially that by writers marginal to the Oxbridge networks which dominated literary culture, Bluemel proposes “intermodernism” as an “analytical tool or useful guidepost” through which to negotiate this evasive but vital writing. Her focal point is the work of George Orwell, but rather than reading him as an isolated figure, she situates him in relation to a group of other similarly unpredictable and innovative writers: Stevie Smith, Mulk Raj Anand and Inez Holden. Intermodern writing, argues Bluemel, frequently occupies a marginal or “non-hegemonic” position, and the otherwise disparate work of Smith, Holden and Anand is linked by the writers' engagement with topics such as gender, race, class, empire and work. Indeed, the writers themselves were obliged to work for a living, and in mapping the network of their relationships – not just with Orwell, but with the politics and institutions of 1930s and 1940s Britain – Bluemel provides a compelling new perspective on the literature and culture of the period.
