Alexandra Harris (1) (1981–)
Auteur van Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
Voor andere auteurs genaamd Alexandra Harris, zie de verduidelijkingspagina.
Over de Auteur
Fotografie: Alexandra Harris
Werken van Alexandra Harris
Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (2010) 179 exemplaren
Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside (2009) — Redacteur; Medewerker — 14 exemplaren
Gerelateerde werken
Archipelago: Number Twelve (Summer 2019) — Medewerker — 1 exemplaar
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I found this generous and expansive book to be an enlightening supplement to other studies of 1930’s and 1940’s England, complementing them, as it is selective in emphasising the Romantic as avant-garde culture takes a step back from European Modernism, to reconnect with earlier British art.
It therefore provides a wide ranging review of culture in Britain/England from a different perspective. This is not about Auden’s “low dishonest decade”, and knowingly doesn’t concentrate on author’s and artists responses to the political situation, instead highlighting their retreat to Georgian sensibilities or attempts to marry the English landscape tradition with European Modernism.
The book looks at lesser known artists, such as John Piper, Eric Ravilious, Rex Whistler and Cecil Beaton, and refers to the writings of the Sitwells, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, rather than George Orwell and Christopher Isherwood; Betjeman, as distinguished from Spender and MacNeice.
The book is beautifully written, for example of Henry Green’s novel:
Full of ornament and sensuality, Loving (1945) is, like Brideshead, a butter-book, making up for what is rationed.
As a cultural history, this book is also excellent at highlighting renewed interest in authors and painters of the past, for example in the chapter about village life, the reissues of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selbourne (1789) with contemporary illustrations. The chapter on village life also shows the author’s wide reading of the period, when after referencing Waugh, Orwell and Greene, she mentions in passing two villages of crime fiction (Sayer’s Fenchurch St Paul and Christie’s St Mary Mead).
For me, this is an excellent book to fill out my knowledge of the period, but isn’t appropriate as an introduction.
Beautifully produced and illustrated, as you expect from Thames and Hudson, with endpapers replicating a Tree and Cow wallpaper design of Edward Bawden.… (meer)