Introduction: What is Intermodernism?

Fascism, comedy, and weak commitments in Nancy Mitford’sWigs on the Green

“…Intermodernism, I would argue, has always been interested in weakness: through its own refusal to subsume works under the ever-expanding label of modernism and its impulse towards writers we might think of as weak (that is, not avant-garde)-the middlebrow, the minor, the popular. By creating a space for scholars to foster critical discussions of writers "whose work and working conditions were different from or eccentric to those of the modernists," 19 intermodernism at its very core is fundamentally concerned with locating, and finding strength in, weakness.…”

“…In its very name, intermodernism reveals its own weak and tactical commitment to modernism: it simultaneously relies on and critiques modernism's strength. 22 Moreover, by going "beyond conceptions of periodicity" through its interest in writing produced across the early twentieth-century (encompassing wartime, the interwar, and the postwar), 23 intermodernism, like Saint-Amour's notion of a "perpetual interwar," critically interrogates the relationship between historical periods and their works, enriching our accounts of twentieth-century literary history. 24 For literary historians, intermodernism is a tool for recovery, bringing attention to writers left out of traditional discussions of modernism.…”

“…Bluemel points to the country landscape as being a "site of origins or identity" for intermodern writers. 42 Mitford herself grew up in the country, and the rural setting of Wigs on the Green is central to a reading of the novel as a critique of fascism. The fictional village of Chalford is in the Cotswolds, an area which interwar rural texts frequently imagined as an idealized version of England.…”

11. Henry Green, Party Going (1939)

“…Green poses a challenge also to the conventional periodization of modernism, as a "critical figure between modernism and postwar [and, arguably, earlier forms of] realism" (Hentea 2014b, 3). As a representative of the second generation of modernist writers, Green is now discussed in connection with competing categories of periodization such as 'intermodernism', 'late modernism' and 'limit modernism' (see Bluemel 2009;Miller 1999;Hentea 2014b). Partly realist, partly (high) modernist, and partly anticipating emergent postmodernist forms of narration, what Hentea calls Green's "experimental realism" (2014b, 6) defies categorization -and invites readers and critics to reassess the foundations for their categories.…”

Towards a Late Modernist Theater

“…Bluemel's study of writers of the 1930s and 1940s shifts the critical focus from late modernism's stylistic hybridity to texts written by "often politically radical" authors who had a sense of democratic "responsibility" and who were "committed to non-canonical, even 'middlebrow' or 'mass' genres." [6] In sum, the trend in studies of late modernism has been to advocate a view of writing from the 1930s to the midtwentieth century as an ethically sound response to political change in the interwar period, or as a democratic aesthetic that was forged as a liberal reaction to the humanitarian crisis of the Second World War.There is a second lacuna: at present, there has been no effort to bring the scholarship on theater in the 1930s and 1940s into dialogue with theories of late modernism. I ascribe this absence to two pressures: from modernist scholarship on one hand (what Puchner identifies as "modernist resistance to the theater") and the crowded field of theater studies on the other.…”