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The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism

Online ISBN:
9781786945228
Print ISBN:
9780990895886
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism

Published online:
24 January 2019
Published in print:
28 February 2016
Online ISBN:
9781786945228
Print ISBN:
9780990895886
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

This book examines a renewed focus upon rural landscapes, culture and traditions among English interwar modernist writers, specifically D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf. All of these figures have a profound sense of attachment to place, but an equally powerful desire to engage with the upheavals of interwar modernity and to participate in contemporary literary experimentation. This dialectic between tradition and change is analogous to a literal geographical shuttling between rural and metropolitan environments, and all four writers display imagery and literary techniques which reflect those experiences. The first chapter emphasises ambivalence in the work of Lawrence, and argues that this is inextricably bound up with his intimate, empathic understanding of place. Chapter Two argues that Powys has a similarly ambivalent relationship with modernity, but defuses this through a fantastical, nostalgic lens; he develops a sense of the landscape as layered, expressing a kind of temporal cosmopolitanism. Chapter Three notes a vexed relationship with modernity and place in the work of Butts; like Powys she attempts to resolve this through a re-enchantment of place, promoting a cosmopolitan reimagining of rural England. Finally, Chapter Four posits Woolf as a figure able to manage tensions between urban and rural, modern and traditional, reflected in the development of an ‘urban pastoral’ form. In all four writers there is evidence that modernism’s expansion of perspectives can be fruitfully extended to those of place and nonhuman animals; the central stress in the conclusion is on the need to incorporate such perspectives.

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