The extinct scene : late modernism and everyday life / Thomas S. Davis.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should "turn the reader's and writer's attention outwards from himself to the world." Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.

The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.

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CHOICE Review

This impressive study warns against simplistic dichotomies, clarifies the fact that historical periods (in this case, modernism) are not distinct from stylistic schools (realism), and admonishes readers who are studying the periodical literature to look at all of the publication, ads included. Though these may seem like commonplaces, much more is at play in this book. Looking at the work of, among others, Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, Vic Reid, documentarian John Grierson, and the British social-research group Mass-Observation (begun in 1930s), Davis (Ohio State Univ.) explores the concerns of late modernism in terms of the end of empire, cataclysmic war, and the minor events of the everyday. He provides fresh insights into a period already intensely studied, offering new and wide-ranging interpretations. He sees an "outward turn" in late modernism, one that reflects modernism's evolution from the modernism of the 1930s. In his epilogue, Davis finds contemporary resonances of late modernism in works such as W. G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001). The changing "historical moment" keeps the everyday both apart and connected, in art and in life. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Aaron John Barlow, New York City College of Technology (CUNY)