Varieties of Modernism, Varieties of Incomprehension: Patrick Hamilton and Elizabeth Bowen

Abstract

One way of seeing British fiction in the 1930s and after is as the flowering of a variety of ways of breaking with established and familiar fictional techniques. One can chart an ever-widening range of experiments and innovations in fictional form and content, any of which might be considered ‘modernist’. My own preferred way of telling the story is to emphasize the ways in which post-1930s’ fiction broke not only with nineteenthcentury traditions but also with the conventions developed in the period of avant-garde modernism, for example in the works of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. New possibilities were tried out, still in response to the novelties of modern life but often at the same time attempting to avoid the ‘unreadability’ and typical difficulties of avantgarde modernism. 1 There are writers whose work can reasonably be labelled modernist while at the same time being accessible, working within or closer to mainstream, popular models of fiction. There was an attempt to win back a broader readership while continuing to be innovative and exploratory. In saying this I have in mind authors such as Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys (Alison Light also presents the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett in something like this perspective). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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