British Modernism and the Four Nations

FAIN: FA-53473-07

Mary Ann Burgess Smyth
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)

Critical accounts of the complex landscape of British literary modernism have tended to model it as "high" or "low," "late" or "early," prewar or interwar. In this new study, I aim to re-configure British modernism by looking at the key ways in which nationality – Scottishness, Welshness, Irishness and Englishness – and national space provided the engine that drove literary and cultural developments. These developments, I argue, began the process that issued, politically speaking, in the "Break-up of Britain."