What is wrong with ‘literary modernism’ as a paradigm? One answer is that it is over-written, a kind of ‘winner’s history’ with a relatively narrow canon of innovative works, even including recent additions. Another is that it is a retrospective construction, rather than a term much used in its period. This book seeks to return to the scene of literary renewal, and to examine representative small groupings struggling, in the wake of the High Modernism of the 1920s, to articulate their own avant-garde ambitions in terms of politics, personal values, aesthetic categories, or continued allegiances to writers like Lawrence. In looking at microhistories, at literary beginnings and even at failure, we are forced to reexamine our mapping of modernism.
