Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place
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Overview
Mary Butts was an important figure in inter-war modernist circles and one who reviewed and associated with some of the major literary figures of the era, from T.S. Eliot to Gertrude Stein. Despite her importance and the varied nature of her writing, she has been a neglected figure in modernist scholarship. Providing a new analysis of the interwar literary period, Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism revisits her work - vividly experimental writings spanning memoir, poetry, polemic and fiction - through the lens of mid-20th-century British neo-Romanticism. The book argues that behind Butts’s eco-feminist writings lies an intricate political and philosophical commentary.
Considers the eco-feminist fiction of the inter-war British writer Mary Butts in the context of the neo-Romantic movement of the mid-20th century.
Includes a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on Mary Butts’s work and British Neo-Romanticsm.
Considers Butts’s work in relation to the inter-war neo-romantic movement and contemporary ecocritical concerns.
Explores the contribution of the neglected writer Mary Butts to inter-war modernism.
Introduction
1. The Rescue of Romanticism? Landscaping the Mystic Self in The Crystal Cabinet
2. Ashe of Rings: Subverting the ‘Country House’ Genre
3. The Taverner Novels and the Secret History of Albion
4. ’Another Kind of Seeing’: Re-visioning the Historical Novel
5. The Bohemian Borders of Modernism in the Short Stories
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
The book does much more, however, than recover a ‘forgotten’ woman writer; it expertly excavates a broad historical and cultural terrain, including visual art, high modernist debates about art, and surrealist archaeological theory.
Successfully incorporates an emphasis upon the neo-romantic elements of Butts’s work with a balanced and insightful assessment of its political implications.
Discussion ranges seamlessly and somewhat indiscriminately across mysticism, magic, the paranormal, the psychic, the ineffable, the unseen, the “sheer force that lies behind” ... Radford offers penetrating glances into a variety of traditions and figures, including (though not limited to) artists such as Paul Nash and John Piper ... Even those who know the works of this curiously neglected author well will find fresh insights here.
- Title: Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place
- Author: Andrew Radford
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2014
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 256
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781441106438, 9781474275743, 1474275745, 144110643X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781441106438
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T10:53:04Z
Andrew Radford is a lecturer in the School of Critical Studies, Glasgow University, UK. His publications include Mapping the Wessex Novel: Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870-1940 (Continuum, 2010) and Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time (2003).