Syncretic Utopia, Transnational Provincialism: Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

Abstract

British leftist literary culture of the 1930s was deeply invested in the utopian possibilities of international exchange. The itinerancy of leftist writers, the international aspirations of important periodicals, and the apparently insatiable appetite during the Popular Front period for international writers’ congresses contributed to the construction of a utopian imaginary from a broader set of leftist cultures. This imaginary is traditionally seen as mediated by the emigre hub of Paris and the Spanish Civil War, but it can also be triangulated between Central Europe, the Soviet Union, and Britain. While many important cultural figures attended leftist conferences in Paris and fought in or reported on the Spanish Civil War, writers such as John Lehmann and Christopher Isherwood were drawn to Central Europe (Isherwood also venturing further afield to China), while organized trips to the Soviet Union were attended by large numbers of British writers. Literary models and theories from German-language and Soviet sources, circulated through translations, travel, correspondence, and conferences, thus played an important role in the development of a distinctive leftist aesthetic during the period. In Raymond Williams’s term, the formation - the aesthetic ideologies at play and the networks through which such ideologies are propagated - of the thirties leftist imaginary was constituted by transnational circuits of production and fuelled by a belief in the utopian possibilities of international exchange.