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Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State (Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series) by Ashley Maher is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State (Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series) about?

Reconstructing Modernism establishes for the first time the centrality of modernist buildings and architectural periodicals to British mid-century literature. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexplored architectural criticism by British authors, this book reveals how arguments about architecture led to innovations in literature, as well as to redesigns in the concept of modernism itself. While the city has long been a focus of literary modernist studies, architectural modernism has never had its due. Scholars usually characterize architectural modernism as a parallel modernism or even an incompatible modernism to literature. Giving special attention to dystopian classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four , this study argues that sustained attention to modern architecture shaped mid-century authors' political and aesthetic commitments. After many writers deemed modernist architects to be agents for communism and other collectivist movements, they squared themselves—and literary modernist detachment and aesthetic autonomy—against the seemingly tyrannical utopianism of modern architecture; literary aesthetic qualities were reclaimed as political qualities. In this way,

Author

Ashley Maher

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published

2020

Language

EN

ISBN

9780198816485

Subjects

Literary Criticism, Literary Fiction, History

Updated

2026-03-24