“Is Your Journey Really Necessary?”: Going Nowhere in Late Modernist London

Abstract

This essay discusses civilian relations to space in the Second World War, focusing on late modernist fiction about wartime London. In novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Patrick Hamilton, and James Hanley, the modernist city has ceased to be the site of expansive, cosmopolitan opportunity it was for writers of the 1920s: permitting civilian death on a massive scale, the city is newly imagined as an anteroom to a brutal common death. Enforced immobility and coerced collectivity find expression in a recursive, subjectivist form that mimics the claustrophobic entrapments these novels describe. A pervasive sense that the mere existence of other people jeopardized one's own points to the limits of familiar stories about civilian solidarity in wartime.

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