Interwar Modernism and the Liberal World Order
Offices, Institutions, and Aesthetics after 1919

Articulates the interwar modernist response to the crisis of liberal world order after 1919.

Gabriel Hankins (Author)

9781108494564, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 August 2019

228 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

What was the modernist response to the global crisis of liberal world order after 1919? This book tells the story of the origins of liberal world governance in Cambridge modernist circles, the literary response to the Versailles Peace of 1919, and the contestation of that institutional moment across a range of world literary modernities. Challenging standard accounts of reactionary postwar politics, Interwar Modernism and the Liberal World Order articulates a modernism animated by the contradictions of liberal governance between the wars. The book develops a new materialist reading of modernist politics hinged on the official figures that traverse both modernist texts and liberal order. This official liberal world shapes interwar arts and letters from wartime Cambridge to revolutionary Shanghai.

1. The queer modernist origins of interwar liberal order
2. Friends and enemies: liberal order in Woolf, Wells, and Woolf
3. The artist as clerk: debt, paperwork, and liberal order in T. S. Eliot
4. Typewriter fiction at the secretariat
5. Black modernist internationalisms between the wars: René Maran, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and Claude McKay.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literature: history & criticism [DS]