balancinghistorybooks's review
4.0
I had had my eye on Alexandra Harris' Romantic Moderns for quite a while before picking it up, both as a generally interesting piece of writing, and an aid to my PhD thesis. Physically, it is a gorgeous tome, with heavy cream paper, and lavish colour illustrations throughout. In her book, Harris discusses the 'modern English renaissance' which occurred during the 1930s and 1940s in quite staggering detail. She unpicks the period, looking at art, architecture, the nature of possessions, literature, and reclaiming heritage, amongst others. Whilst a lot of the art did not personally appeal to me, I found the wording and things which Harris touched upon fascinating on the whole. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the modernisation of cookery, and weather. I am also fascinated by the English village, and found the chapter which deals with its preservation far-reaching and insightful. Harris writes wonderfully; her style is at times academic, but feels readily accessible to a wider audience.
onerodeahorse's review
3.0
An engaging book about the attempts, in British art and culture during the 1930s and 1940s, to reconcile the formal experimentation of modernism with the traditions of British life. Harris takes the reader on a journey through art (John Piper features prominently, as do critics like Roger Fry and Cyril Connolly, and the Shell-Mex adverts of the mid-century), literature (Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden), food writing, horticulture, architecture and more. In each case, she investigates the ways that thinkers tried to tap into strains of a specifically British traditions - the village green, the rolling hills, the hedgerows, the parish church, the cloudy weather, the country piles, the gardens - and bring them together with the abstract, geometric, progressive world of modernism.
There's a tremendous amount of food for thought here. The book is very much aimed at the general reader, who will come away from this book with a renewed appreciation for the intellectual journey of a John Betjeman or an Osbert Sitwell. But lurking in the background here throughout, never quite mentioned openly, is, of course, class. Certainly many of these thinkers, and their attempts to carve out a British modernism, seem to revolve entirely around large country mansions, landscaped gardens and other facets of a specific type of English life unavailable to the majority. Indeed, cities, and the (working class) people who live in them barely feature at all in Romantic Moderns, which I think is a shame.
There's a tremendous amount of food for thought here. The book is very much aimed at the general reader, who will come away from this book with a renewed appreciation for the intellectual journey of a John Betjeman or an Osbert Sitwell. But lurking in the background here throughout, never quite mentioned openly, is, of course, class. Certainly many of these thinkers, and their attempts to carve out a British modernism, seem to revolve entirely around large country mansions, landscaped gardens and other facets of a specific type of English life unavailable to the majority. Indeed, cities, and the (working class) people who live in them barely feature at all in Romantic Moderns, which I think is a shame.
More...