In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that...
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reviews
Jul 27, 2011
I can't join in the applause this book has been receiving. I think the argument of the book isn't very well made, and I suppose I have a slight aversion to the Little Englandism the artists, musicians, architects and writers covered in the book embody. This is supposed to be a revisionist cultural history of the 30's and 40's arguing that England was not in fact the backward, Modernism hating country people say it was, and that our thinkers and creatives produced a native, somewhat conservative
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Aug 22, 2011
Can the masterworks of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf be discussed in the same pages as the perfectly delightful but infinitely less significant work of the photographer Cecil Beaton and the graphic artists Rex Whistler and Edward Bawden? I certainly did not believe this could be done well, until I read Alexandra Harris’s new book. There is no question that Romantic Moderns is calculated to please Anglophiles. But Harris, a young English art historian, does not coddle her core audience. <a h
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Feb 23, 2011
Sophie
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This is the sort of book that makes me feel inadequate. Just 30 years old and Alexandra Harris has managed to pull off a book that is immensely readable and enjoyable, yet serious and academic at the same time. She looks at arts and attitudes in the 1930s and 1940s and sets against Modernism (abstract, minimalist, functional) the more prevailing attitudes in England of wanting to have roots, to belong to the land and almost of nostalgia. She looks at poetry, novels, non-fiction writing, architec
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Apr 02, 2011
Annez
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Engagingly written survey of how modernism evolved through English literature, art, and even gardens and homes during the 1930s and 1940s.
Nov 06, 2010
Lazarus
rated it:
Charmingly illustrated tour around the parochial backwaters of early twentieth-century British art.
Aug 21, 2011
Cathy
rated it:
Lively and engaging view of a fascinating group- and fresh air to Lorca's sweltering heat
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