Place, Personalism, Anarchism, & Fantasy: Recasting Late Modernism

Abstract

AbstractThis essay outlines an ongoing critical intervention in the growing field of late modernist studies by recuperating anarchism as a political philosophy for English language writers of the 1930s and 1940s. The first section gives an overview of the development of late modernism as a critical category and how its early basis in Marxist criticism developed from the Auden generation. The second section traces new and expanded international networks made visible through attention to anarchist rather than Marxist sensibilities. The third section considers the development of fantasy genre fiction based on the emergence of major authors from the antiauthoritarian literary networks outlined and as a continuation of the political transformation of activism to literary aesthetics and form. The conclusion anticipates coming expansions in the critical corpus through attentiveness to anarchism more broadly in late modernist studies and the new modernist studies generally.