Saturday 25 September 2010

Art and Literature in the Inter-War Years. . .

This review in the Guardian has really made me want to read Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artist and the Imagination From Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris.

From the review, written by Kathryn Hughes:

They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing smacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris, romantic moderns celebrated the way England's crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.

I love this inter-war period of art and literature in all of its many beautiful and varied forms. I'll definitely be getting my hands on a copy of this.

1 comment:

Lulu said...

I've been looking at this book every time I've set foot in Waterstones for the past few weeks - it really does look fantastic. It's very dense though - I think I'll wait for the pb :)

www.lampandbook.blogspot.com