This volume follows a strand of British literature running through the 1930s and 1940s, what it terms an “intermodernism” of which the main characteristics are a democratic and communitarian sensibility, an explicit commitment to political engagement and historical responsibility, and an accommodation or hybridization of modernizing aspirations with realist representational strategies. Intermodernism is an attractive book in its own right, full of thoughtful and often surprising readings of particular texts, writers, and movements. It is also a welcome and substantial contribution to the ongoing rediscovery of mid-twentieth-century British writing: that “fascinating, compelling and grossly neglected” body of work, as Kristin Bluemel sums it up in her opening paragraph (1).

Among the volume's contributors are many critics who have already done essential work to reconstruct and recuperate this critically rather obscure period. John Fordham writes on the working-class South Shields novelist Harold Heslop; Faye Hammill addresses Stella Gibbons's fictional rehabilitations of the much-derided suburbs; Allan Hepburn discusses Elizabeth Bowen's early postwar The Heat of the Day (1949) in relation to the contemporary visibility of legal-ethical uncertainties surrounding culpability, complicity, trial, and judgment; Phyllis Lassner describes the national and transnational preoccupations and implications of wartime espionage fiction by Margery Allingham and Helen MacInnes; Elizabeth Maslen surveys Storm Jameson's long career as writer and activist; and Janet Montefiore explores what prove to have been the curiously topical midcentury medievalisms of Sylvia Townsend Warner and T. H. White. Given that feminist scholars have been on the vanguard of literary studies on this period in Britain (Lassner, Maslen, and Montefiore, for example), it is not surprising that women writers are so fully and well represented in this collection nor that their specifically public roles and commitments are given such extended treatment, as in Debra Rae Cohen's discussion of witnessing in Rebecca West's wartime Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) and her subsequent reports on the Nuremberg trials, as well as in the contributions by Hepburn, Lassner, and Maslen.

An important corrective to customary ideas of the 1930s is proposed in the collection's emphasis on the prose of a period traditionally identified so strongly with its poets (the old “Auden Generation” view of the 1930s). Aside from the many essays on fiction included here, Lisa Colletta's meticulous essay on J. B. Priestley uses his English and U.S. travel writing to analyze his ambivalent attitude to the mass cultural forms within which he himself worked. The importance of film in this decade, too, gets valuable acknowledgment in Laura Marcus's essay on the cross-media, cross-disciplinary phenomenon of documentary, where she reconstructs the relationships between cinematic and literary realisms in the 1930s. Her chapter and Nick Hubble's absorbing work of historical reconstruction, which makes an intriguing case for William Empson's contribution to the founding of Mass-Observation, constitute the book's final section, “Documents.” The volume's other categories for organizing the characteristic concerns of the period are “Work,” “Community,” and “War.”

This is an impressively coherent collection, but no less striking are those moments when it reads less like a conventional edited volume than a project launch. So, the book opens with a bracing manifesto/polemic from Bluemel on the necessity and desirability of her neologistic “intermodernism” and ends with a catalog of “intermodernists” for further study: not just a launch but an invitation too. In the end, my misgivings about accepting that invitation to embrace intermodernism have little to do with the term and still less to do with this stimulating book. As far as the term is concerned, I imagine it would be possible to take issue with defining midcentury writing primarily in relation to modernism (inter-modernism), though I, for one, share this book's sense that modernism's enduringly prestigious accomplishments supply the most useful context for thinking about what followed, and about its marginalization. And inter-modernism is surely appropriate to the historical and cultural situation of these writers: between the wars, say, or between modernism and postmodernism, or between the canonical and the ephemeral. (“Middlebrow,” I would have said but for Maslen's salutary demolition in her essay of this ugly phrenological adjective.) Intermodernism is in its way a perfectly expressive designation.

So if I have any argument with Intermodernism, it is probably an argument with the wider state of affairs it implies, a disciplinary condition in which the best way to get these powerful thinkers and artists taken seriously by literary critics—and it may be telling that many of the period's writers (Graham Greene, say, or Anthony Powell) have never lacked lay readers—is to invent a term and a taxonomy for them, as if only an “-ism” of their own can make them respectably readable again. And whether, more generally, codifying “-isms” make for interesting reading in the longer run remains an open question, notwithstanding the quality of the initial essays this one has brought into being here. Of course, Bluemel may be right to suppose that we are collectively so insensible to the interest of the midcentury period that its literature will not receive its due until dignified with a critical designation. Still, that would be a somewhat ironic conclusion to draw from a book addressing this congeries of writers often so clear-sighted and outspoken about intellectuals' susceptibility (silly, sad, and sometimes sinister) to the allure of prepackaged formulas, as the Orwell scholar Bluemel will know. These were, after all, “radical eccentrics” in the alternative wording provided by her previous title, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (New York, 2004). “Radically eccentric” is less catchy, perhaps, but I think it captures the uncompromising individuality, the deep political seriousness, and the refreshing artistic waywardness of the midcentury figures on whom she and her contributors have shed much light here and in their earlier work.