Reading the Ruins
Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture

This vivid reading of wartime culture investigates the significance of London's bombsites by bringing together famous and forgotten authors.

Leo Mellor (Author)

9781107009295, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 September 2011

256 pages, 9 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 1.6 cm, 0.54 kg

"...It rewards careful reading from start to finish, for both the wealth of understudied material it introduces and the close readings that go with it. Properly digested, its contents will serve an important purpose indeed, refuting for once and for all any suggestion that modernism weakened and died around 1940."
--Journal of British Studies

From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Yet throughout the years prior to the Second World War, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. They appeared as content, with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper; and also as form, in the shapes of broken poetics. But from the outbreak of the Second World War what had been an aesthetic mode began to resemble a proleptic template. During that conflict many modernist writers – such as Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, David Jones, J. F. Hendry, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot and Rose Macaulay – engaged with devastated cityscapes and the altered lives of a nation at war. To understand the potency of the bombsites, both in the Second World War and after, Reading the Ruins brings together poetry, novels and short stories, as well as film and visual art.

Introduction
1. Imagining destruction
2. A metropolis aflame
3. Surrealism and the bombsites
4. The haunted city
5. The new London jungle
Coda
Notes, Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]