Interwar Fiction Research Articles

Exceptionality and the unexceptional in Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

When it comes to modernist exceptions, Jean Rhys appears as a particularly striking case in point: her marginality as a white creole woman writer who shunned the literary circles in both Paris and London, her notably twisted editorial history, her disappearance for twenty-five years and the retrospective rediscovery, in the 1960s, of her interwar texts, have sparked an ongoing debate about the question of her place in the modernist canon. Her experimental poetics, which was acknowledged as exceptional by Ford Madox Ford as early as 1927, is characterized by a sense of jaded experience, the juxtaposition of indifferent and even interchangeable places and people, as well as a semantic and syntactic minimalism based on repetition. The aim of this article is to show how Jean Rhys’s exceptionality as a modernist writer relies as much on her canonical unplaceability as, paradoxically, on her aesthetics of the unexceptional.

‘Conducting his own Campaigns’: Evelyn Waugh and Propaganda

Abstract This essay examines Evelyn Waugh as practitioner and critic in the field of wartime propaganda. In 1941, Waugh produced a fictitious account of a British Commando raid on German territory in North Africa for publication in Britain and the United States, an episode which reveals his skill as a propagandist, but also prompts scrutiny of his contacts with British propaganda agencies and agents and of the effect of propaganda on his writings. Waugh’s interwar fiction exhibits a sophisticated understanding of the evolving and growing power of modern propaganda, but the novels also anticipate the public relations and psychological warfare campaigns of the Second World War, specifically those carried out by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service established in 1941 to produce and coordinate propaganda to enemy and occupied Europe. Waugh’s proximity to the PWE is suggested by a dense network of social and professional connections, and is further indicated by a series of references to the PWE and its work which I have uncovered in his fiction. Allusions to covert propaganda in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy betray Waugh’s understanding of the PWE’s operations, but also provide a critique of the corrosive and unforeseen effects of information warfare waged by the secret state and offer a productive means of re-examining his much-noted anxieties regarding modernity and mid-century political change.

Aristocracy Must Advertise: Repurposing the Nobility in Interwar British Fiction

AbstractIn the interwar years, authors Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham wrote popular detective fiction that explored possible roles for the aristocracy in an age of universal suffrage. Critics have seen these novels as nostalgic encomia for hierarchy and tradition. This article argues that they should be seen instead as part of a larger trend in interwar fiction that sought to make connections between aristocracy, national identity, and social cohesion. Far from celebrating an imagined idyllic past, these novels suggested possibilities for the continuing relevance of the nobility to the upholding of justice, and indeed, to the success of British democracy.

Hearing Voices: The Extended Mind in Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Waugh's last comic novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) takes ‘exterior modernism’ to a new height, no longer avoiding interiority – as in his interwar fiction – but exteriorising the interior through dissociation. ‘The Box’, to which the writer-protagonist attributes the source of the tormenting voices, may well be his own mind, an extended – albeit unhealthy – mind that works as a radio: he transmits his thoughts and then receives them as external signals in order to communicate with them. Pinfold's auditory hallucinations are caused by the breakdown of communication. Interestingly, writing is also a dissociative activity. Concerned with the writer's block, the novel reflects on the creative process and illuminates the relationship between madness and creativity. If dissociation, or the splitting of the mind, is a defence against trauma, the traumatic experience Pinfold attempts to suppress is the Second World War. The unusual state of mind accentuates the contingency of Waugh's radio writing; his preferred medium is cinema.

Farewell, Socialist Gwen: Poverty and the Politics of Injury in Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction

This essay studies how Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction represents the poverty of its protagonists as penury (‘no money’) and a physically degrading fall into ‘ugliness’ and uncleanliness, rendering an embodied experience of precarity at the nexus of social identity and psychological injury. The autobiographical ‘Essay on England,’ in which Rhys names an adolescent persona, Socialist Gwen, illustrates how the fall into poverty entailed a heightened attachment to bourgeois standards of white femininity, standards that are loudly protested by various protagonists in the interwar fiction, and that additionally naturalize black poverty in the Caribbean and ‘ugliness’ in French working-class women, marked for their social particularity. It is an admixture of critique and untoward complaint that characterizes Jean Rhys’s literary imagination, one shaped by a sense that socio-economic precarity hurts white, middle-class women more than it does others.

The Old Peace of Absalom, Absalom!: Interwar Faulkner and the Tradition of Nonviolence

The Old Peace of Absalom, Absalom!:Interwar Faulkner and the Tradition of Nonviolence Caitlin Cawley (bio) Introduction William Faulkner's life was shaped by war. He lived through World War I and World War II, and despite being born thirty years after President Andrew Johnson signed Proclamation 157, "Declaring that Peace, Order, Tranquility and Civil Authority Now Exists in and Throughout the Whole of the United States of America," the Southerner wrote about the wrote about the uniquely American Civil War throughout his work. In 1950, Faulkner used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to address the question that had come to define humankind in the wake of atomic warfare: "When will I be blown up?" Twelve years later, as he lay dying in Byhalia, Mississippi, the United States was once again preparing for war, this time in Vietnam, a conflict which would lack the Manichean frames of reference shaping America's collective memory of the First and Second World Wars. That war would come to epitomize Jason Compson Sr.'s advice to his son Quentin in The Sound and the Fury: "[N]o battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools" (76). Faulkner created a body of work that, among many things, labors to subvert the conditions and illusions that support war and, in turn, underwrite the modern individual's terrorised state. And while scholars have attended to this labor for decades, there is little critical consensus over Faulkner's views on war and its antinomy, pacifism. Like many of his fellow modernists, Faulkner had a complicated relationship with pacifism that reflects the socio-political climate in the United States and Europe between WWI and WWII as well as the writer's personal history. [End Page 127] In 1918, the Mississippi native made a rather ignominious attempt to join the fight against the Central Powers. Inspired partly by the legacy of his great grandfather who served as an officer in the Civil War and partly by by his heartbreak over a beloved high-school sweetheart marrying another man, the twenty-year-old joined the Royal Air Force in Canada. He never saw combat, but Faulkner made a mountain out of his five months as a RAF cadet, posing for years as a combat veteran and fabricating an elaborate mythology around this posture. Donald Kartiganer sums up the paradoxes that characterize this layer of the Southerner's biography as Faulkner "honoring the combatants of that war through the flattery of imitation and yet also [importantly,] mocking the mythology that had attached itself to them … Faulkner's war consists of zany theatrics, gallant pratfalls: gestures so empty of serious military content that they become at once farcical and heroic" (632). Faulkner's ironic and critical bellicosity found its way into his interwar fiction as well. His writings from the period are replete with naive Southern characters who enthusiastically participate in the Civil War and First World War. And while Kartiganer insists that Faulkner's "doubleedged performance becomes the key to the wars he described in his fiction, wars that reflect, with increasing complexity, the characteristic Southern conflict of 'looking two ways'" (632), Faulkner's life and interwar fiction also register a broader transatlantic intellectual and political movement. By the 1930s, pacifism had gained significant ground on the left. However, Hitler's programme of remilitarization led many of the American writer's British contemporaries to question their campaigns for peace and disarmament. At the Labour Party Conference in 1935, the party leader, George Lansbury, decided to support rearmament despite his self-professed commitment to Christian pacifism (Briggs 314–5). Virginia and Leonard Woolf were in attendance at the conference, and like England's pacifist-leaning literati, the couple was divided on the decision. Virginia reflected on the conference in her diary, writing that her "sympathies" were with "non-resistance," and through figures like Antigone and mediums like her political pamphlets, she worked to advance a precedent for resisting perpetual warfare, culminating in her pacifist manifesto Three Guineas (1938) (Woolf 315). Leonard, on the other hand, who was closely involved in...

Fashion in Jean Rhys/Jean Rhys in Fashion

This article proposes a reciprocal relationship between Jean Rhys's interwar fiction and the mass media that popularised her work in the 1960s and 1970s. Surveying the signs that Rhys and her writing had become fashionable – for example, press reviews and profiles, including in colour supplements and fashion magazines (even her own shoot), along with television adaptations of the work she wrote or set in the 1930s – the piece discusses how her postwar ‘readers’ interpreted this literature of an earlier period in a way that made sense of their own era. It argues that this use of the past to understand the contemporary moment follows the logic of fashion's cyclical temporality, and that it was prefigured in the fashion-conscious, modernist short stories of Rhys's first publication, The Left Bank (1927). The article ultimately suggests that Rhys's work was subject to fashion, an eventuality that it had always envisaged.

A ‘Fine, Mysterious, Almost Sacred Fable’? Retelling the Grail Quest in Mary Butts’Armed with Madness

This article scrutinises the critically overlooked interwar fiction of the British novelist Mary Franeis Butts (1890–1937). While textual scholars have canvassed her persistent flirtation with strains of anti-equalitarian harangue, comparatively little attention is paid to her literary–religious formulations, especially her ‘science of mysticism’, and her energetically eccentric approach to Grail lore. Her second published novel Armed with Madness (1928) situates the ‘Sanc Grail’ as the centrepiece of a dissident mythic vision in which troublingly violent encounters play out against an animistic backdrop of pre-Christian survivals. For Butts, the modern-day Grail Quest offers scant solace to pilgrims wishing to excavate the historic conditions of faith; rather it involves an experience of cleansing discomfort that reflects an age of post-war civic ferment.

A drop of water from a stagnant pool? Inter-war detective fiction and the rural community

Detective fiction has been little considered by historians of the British inter-war village. This is despite the phenomenal publishing and sales in this literary genre. Agatha Christie is the bestselling writer of books of all time, and millions of people world-wide have learnt about English villages by reading her. This article discusses why inter-war fiction is instructive to social historians. It concentrates on the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of this fiction: notably the authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and G. K. Chesterton. The subject is approached through a number of themes, which address the genre, county house settings, the nature and morphology of the detected village, representations of villagers and the poor, the literary detectives (notably Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey) and their relation to village life, the local role of gossip, depictions of the clergy, the fictional uses of material culture, senses of the past, the detection of ‘evil’ and issues of inter-war village renewal. A binding strand throughout is how the English village community is handled and interpreted in this fiction. The article argues that the detective genre is important and highly revealing to social and rural historians, and deserves extended analysis.

Bergelson and the landscape of Yiddish modernism

This article examines Dovid Bergelson’s modernist writing in relationship to the shifting geography of Yiddish culture after World War I. During the 1920s, a series of debates raged in the Yiddish press about the true centre of Yiddish literature. These discussions about Yiddish literary centres, including Bergelson’s own polemic, “Dray tsentern” (Three centres), were also aesthetic debates regarding the future direction of Yiddish literature in the absence of a national home. In “Three centres” Bergelson envisions the new Jewish writer emerging from the agricultural colonies of the Crimean steppes. Though a surprising vision from a Jewish emigrant writer in Berlin, Bergelson turns to the steppes as a way to break free from Yiddish literature’s attachment to the shtetl. However, a close reading of his interwar fiction illuminates how his modernist aesthetic derives from the irresolvable conflict between the old Jewish landscape of the shtetl and the new spaces of Jewish life in the post‐World War I period.

‘This way to the exhibition’: genealogies of urban spectacle in Jean Rhys's interwar fiction

Both Jean Rhys's relationship to modernism and her representation of urban space need to be understood as engaging with a tangled history of exhibitory practices informing metropolitan spatiality. I trace this engagement through the interwar fiction, to Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Through her insertion into the latter text of the 1937 Paris World's Fair, Rhys presents the 'exhibition' as exemplary for a regime of metropolitan representation based on an imperial legacy of ethnographic-cumcommodity display. Her exploration of urban space, through the related sites of the hotel, the exhibition and the street, draws on the Surrealist aesthetics of dream and automatism, which offer crucial, if highly ambiguous, strategies for uncovering the interdependence between metropolitan and colonial spaces within daily life, notably the use of ethnography as a critical and diagnostic tool to be employed both within and against the institutional spaces of art. Rhys's relationship to modernism thus turns on the status of ethnographic display within metropolitan perception, and on its role as a hidden link between capitalist and fascist modernities.

John Dos Passos, Blaise Cendrars, and the "Other" Modernism

The interwar French avant-garde long considered John Passos as an eminent literary figure. Passos's influence on French writers and editors, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude-Edmond Magny, is now, of course, a critical commonplace. Sartre, in his 1938 article on U.S.A., considered Passos to be greatest writer of our time (80). Magny, in her preface to the 1949 French edition of The 42nd Parallel, praised Passos as an innovative portrayer of la condition humaine (Stolzfus 218). Critics have also recognized the influence of avant-garde painters on Passos and extensively documented his various biographical associations with France.(1) But the influence of the French writer Blaise Cendrars on Passos's Manhattan Transfer has not been adequately treated. The present scholarship on the Passos-Cendrars link is severely piecemeal, and it often lacks the needed historical contexts. Many of Passos's most important interwar influences--French (Cendrars), Italian (Ungaretti), and Belgian (Verhaeren)--have been overlooked in Passos criticism. Historically, American critics have tended to neglect transatlantic twentieth-century influences, even those as important as Cendrars, and the valuable work of the many French poet-theorists (e.g., Soupault, Aragon, Desnos, Breton, Jacob) active during the 1900-1930 period. The large body of American criticism assigns Passos's main aesthetic influences to Joyce, Eisenstein, Eliot, and Whitman. Discussing the form of Manhattan Transfer, Iain Colley's Passos and the Fiction of Despair is representative in attributing Dos Passos's borrowings to what Colley calls the true experimentalists: Stein, Joyce, Carl Sandburg, Dreiser, Hemingway, and John Reed (60). Revealingly, Colley, contravening Passos's own statements on literary works particularly suggestive in determining the form of Manhattan Transfer, provides, like most other British and American critics, the traditional Anglophone list. Passos, however, in a letter to Melvin Landsberg (Sep. 23, 1957), has cited (with the exception of Stephen Crane) only foreign authors as possible influences on Manhattan Transfer: Baroja, Verhaeren, Zola, Flaubert, and Blaise Cendrars (243-244).(2) In light of this current critical dearth, Cendrars's role in Passos studies merits special attention. An overlooked origin of Passos's interwar fiction is Cendrars's early poetry (1912-1926). Poetry, as Passos recounts in The Best Times, more important than submarines or war guilt or brave little Belgium or the big board on the New York Stock Exchange (24). But it was less the poetry of Eliot, Pound, and other Anglophone modernists than the experiments of Cendrars and the French avant-garde that pushed Passos to try poetry as fiction. Passos in 1926 wrote an article on Cendrars, Homer of the Trans-Siberian (1926), published that same year in the Saturday Review of Literature. Passos's translations of Cendrars's Panama (1913), Transsiberien (1913), and selections from Documentaires (1923) and Feuilles de Route (1924) between the first and second volumes of U.S.A. attest to his continued, engaged interest in Cendrars's poetry. Passos, of course, began his writing career as a poet, publishing Eight Harvard Poets in 1917 and A Pushcart at the Curb in 1922, both of which contain a wide assortment of imagist and free-form poems. While there is, as Linda Wagner argues in The Modern American Novel, ample proof that Passos a staunch admirer of Ezra Pound (28), this is only part of the formative influence story. At the end of her modernist-imagist argument, Wagner asserts: Much of [modernistic writing] stemmed from the basically poetic technique of concentrating meaning and emotion in an image.... This new intuition, this relatively new way of apprehending, encouraged writers to accept the device of the image or scene as a means of making their perceptions fresh, clear, and immediate. …