Micromodernism - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture) by Tim Armstrong (Hardcover)

About the Book

Rethinks modernism as a category by focusing on little-known late-modernist groupings of authors.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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"