The Asymmetry of British Modernism: Hugh MacDiarmid and Wyndham Lewis

Abstract

Devolution in the United Kingdom has begun to affect our understanding of modern literary history, if only because the tendency silently to conflate English with British has been made increasingly problematic. This is particularly marked in the case of Scotland. Critics and historians of Scottish literature have asserted the continuity of a different tradition north of the border. Scholars writing on English literature take pains not to make generalisations that seem to apply to the other country. But while this may represent appropriate caution in asking how contemporary British literature is constituted in the context of the process of political devolution, or in relation to the Romantic period, when Edinburgh could boast both a distinctive intellectual tradition and a thriving publishing industry, it may be more problematic in relation to the period we describe as 'modernist'. The increased presence of the national question in the study of modernist literature, and the development of transnational approaches to literary study, also foreground the tacit assumptions that may have guided earlier accounts of tradition. 1 But does our caution lead us to overstate cultural and artistic difference? In this essay I will reflect on this problem by examining the relationship between Scotland's preeminent modernist poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Wyndham Lewis, who plays a central, if contested, role in our understanding of modernism in Britain. British historians have stressed the significance of the late 1920s and 1930s for the formation of our contemporary understanding of nation. The vocabulary of national character was ubiquitous, argues