A Room of One’s Own?

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1, “A Room of One’s Own? Postwar Modernism and the Reconstructive Imagination,” begins amidst the ruins of the British Home Front, where the modernist ethos of “only connect” finds itself at odds with new ideas of collective justice raised by postwar reconstruction and the welfare state. As an inheritor of literary modernism, Elizabeth Bowen offers unique insight into the fate of the novel at midcentury and its task of registering social change. This chapter reads Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949) as a work that collapses the relationships afforded by modernist treatments of interpersonal intimacy, while also testing the potential of domestic space to catalyze new modes of sociality. Yet, this is also where Bowen’s novel meets its limit, as its horrified gaze into the working-class home produces a proto-sociological condemnation often found in the literatures of reconstruction. The chapter then closes with a consideration of Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film A Diary for Timothy (1945).