ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

Chapter 4: Spirituality and Delusion: The Middle as Rupture in
the Consciousness in Rayner Heppenstall’s Saturnine
World War II arguably marks the end of modernism as a historical movement
in literature, with postmodernism emerging around the same time in many accounts. 18
This makes the war itself a sort of middle in the history of experimental literary
movements in English language literature. While this study of modernist middles is
primarily formal, rather than historical, in nature, McHale notes the importance of the
history of such movements to his formal definitions of modernism and
postmodernism, which is not merely a sequential, but a causal, history:
“Postmodernism follows from modernism” (McHale 5). This causal element is
actually what allows McHale to move from the historical to the formal: instead of
simply following temporally from modernism, postmodernism also follows logically
from postmodernism. Thus, we have the ontological dominant following from the
epistemological dominant. This is all a roundabout way of saying: World War II does
not mark an end of modernism, but rather, a sort of middle, after which it is no longer
associated with the most influential experimental novelists. In Britain in particular,
postwar modernist and experimental literature would generally be either ignored or
subjected to ideological contempt, as realism became the resurgent standard for
English literature (Green 99). It is worth considering, too, that World War II had a
powerful, lingering economic effect that, beyond any direct effects on the culture,
18 The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, for example, places
Modernism “in England from early in the 20 th c. and during the 1920s and 1930s,” (Cuddon,
“modernism”), while postmodernism begins in “the 1940s and 1950s” (Cuddon, “post-modernism”).
Notably, Calinescu tracks the first American use of the term “post-modernist” to Randall Jarrell in
1946 (Calinescu 267).
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