Romantic Moderns

Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties. In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops. Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately, wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern” need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest. A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea-shops. In this multi-awardwinning book now available in paperback Alexandra Harris tells a different story. In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, they showed that the modern need not be at war with the past. Constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré, László Moholy-Nagy, was beguiled into taking photographs for Betjemans nostalgic Oxford University Chest. This modern English renaissance was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper, Virginia Woolf, Florence White, Christopher Tunnard, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster and the Sitwells are part of the story, along with Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea-shops. In this multi-award-winning book, Alexandra Harris tells a different story. In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, they showed that the modern need not be at war with the past. Constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré, László Moholy-Nagy, was beguiled into taking photographs for Betjemans nostalgic Oxford University Chest. This modern English renaissance was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper, Virginia Woolf, Florence White, Christopher Tunnard, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster and the Sitwells are part of the story, along with Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

A charming extraordinary early 20th century novel about family relationships. When the great statesman Lord Slane dies, everyone assumes his dutiful wife will slowly fade away, the paying guest of each of her six children. But Lady Slane surprises everyone by escaping to a rented house in Hampstead where she revels in her new freedom, revives youthful ambitions and gathers some very unsuitable companions. Irreverent, entertaining and insightful, this is a tale of the unexpected joys of growing older. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOANNA LUMLEY

Between the Acts is the final novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1941 shortly after her suicide. This is a book laden with hidden meaning and allusion. It describes the mounting, performance, and audience of a festival play (hence the title) in a small English village just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Much of it looks forward to the war, with veiled allusions to connection with the continent by flight, swallows representing aircraft, and plunging into darkness. The pageant is a play within a play, representing a rather cynical view of English history. Woolf links together many different threads and ideas - a particularly interesting technique being the use of rhyme words to suggest hidden meanings. Relationships between the characters and aspects of their personalities are explored. The English village bonds throughout the play through their differences and similarities. Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer who is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Kern divides love into its elements and traces profound changes in each: from waiting for love to ending it. Most revealing are the daring ways moderns began to talk about their current lovemaking as well as past lovers.

Modernist writers, critics, and artists sparked a fresh and distinctive interpretation of Shakespeare's plays which has proved remarkably tenacious, as Richard Halpern explains in this lively and provocative book. The preoccupations of such high modernists as T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce set the tone for the critical reception of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Halpern contends their habits of thought continue to dominate postmodern schools of criticism that claim to have broken with the modernist legacy. Halpern addresses such topics as imperialism and modernism's cult of the primitive, the rise of mass culture, modernist anti-semitism, and the aesthetic of the machine. His discussion considers figures as diverse as Orson Welles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Shakespeare critics including Northrop Frye, Cleanth Brooks, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Cavell. Shakespeare's works have been subjected to a continuing process of historical reinterpretation in which every new era has imposed its own cultural and ideological presuppositions on the plays. The most enduring contribution of modernism, Halpern suggests, has been the juxtaposition of an awareness of historical distance and a mapping of Shakespeare's plays onto the present. Using modernist themes and approaches, he constructs new readings of four Shakespeare plays.

A lively look at the English literary and artistic responses to the weather from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Keats and Ian McEwan In a sweeping panorama, Weatherland allows us to witness England’s cultural climates across the centuries. Before the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxons living in a wintry world wrote about the coldness of exile or the shelters they had to defend against enemies outside. The Middle Ages brought the warmth of spring; the new lyrics were sung in praise of blossoms and cuckoos. Descriptions of a rainy night are rare before 1700, but by the end of the eighteenth century the Romantics had adopted the squall as a fit subject for their most probing thoughts. The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, and Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details. There is the drawing of a twelfth-century man in February, warming bare toes by the fire. There is the tiny glass left behind from the Frost Fair of 1684, and the Sunspan house in Angmering that embodies the bright ambitions of the 1930s. Harris catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. “Bloody cold,” says Jonathan Swift in the “slobbery” January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one. Weatherland is a celebration of English air and a life story of those who have lived in it.