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This chapter focuses on the discourses that surrounded the 1936 International Surrealist exhibition in London and the development of a distinctly British Surrealist movement in the years leading up to the Second World War. Using the debates in the periodical press about the movement – and how it might represent a particularly English or British avant garde – this chapter articulates the connection between the movement’s leaders in Britain and the rise of institutional structures to encourage avant garde work in Britain. In particular, it sees Herbert Read as one of the key mediators of modernism in Britain, and ultimately the key driver for the institutionalisation of modernism in Britain in the years around the Second World War.

This chapter examines the importance of the memory of the First World War to Herbert Read’s political thought, contextualising this process of memory formation through his interactions with two of the war’s leading literary figures: Richard Aldington and Erich Maria Remarque. Emphasising the importance of the post-war context in cultivating Read’s political reading of his experiences, it shows how the war continued to shape his political thought. Read’s experiences led to an abhorrence of violence and in turn a commitment to pacifism and gradualist tactics. Moreover, his time in the trenches led him to recognise the importance of ‘fidelity’ between members of a group in ensuring survival in times of extreme danger. Shorn of its militarist associations, this idea, Read argued, could helpfully bolster anarchist conceptions of organisation.

William Kupinse looks to Herbert Read’s speculative novel, The Green Child, in order to suggest that seeing cold, stony modernist emotion as affective, and therefore material, requires a transformation of one’s understanding of the body. This body, which holds a kinship with objects, is the opposite of life. This transmutation is staged in Read’s novel, where emotions are felt as colors on the skin and the height of life is achieved via a contemplation that turns one’s body to solid crystal.

This chapter studies how British culture served as a form of counter-history, revealing that George Orwell and Herbert Read visualised a naturalised cultural habitus as a safeguard against a threatening history. On the other hand, H.G. Wells envisioned a post-historical and rationally administered culture as a cure to the violent crisis of the historical present. The discussion then examines the works of Orwell, Read, Wells, Robert Graves and Ezra Pound in 1941. This is followed by a study of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, her posthumously published novel.

This chapter discusses how the major advances in endocrinology, entomology and evolutionary biology during the interwar years of the early 1900s influenced the works of the English poets, Herbert Read, William Empson, W.H. Auden and John Rodker. It suggests that the most significant implication of biology on these modernist poets was a sense of the human as falling away into the animal and, at the same time, sparked a renewed interest in human emotion and behavior in an expanded chemical and environmental context.

World War I has long been considered literary modernism’s defining historical event, a catastrophe that changed avant-garde optimism into postwar pessimism and fragmentation; however, the utopian rhetoric of post-World War I architecture, along with writers’ enthusiastic elaboration of that rhetoric through architectural criticism, undermines any neat division. Instead, this chapter establishes a late 1920s and 1930s tendency to identify in hindsight a wartime rupture between the national future and the modernist future, as literary and architectural cooperation began to dissolve. Amid the rise of architectural modernism in Britain, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Wyndham Lewis scrutinized the cultural integration of modernist forms. While Waugh and Betjeman increasingly emphasized modernist architecture’s inability to provide a lasting social or physical structure for the nation, Lewis rued the perceived cooption of modernism by leftist, materialist movements and instead promoted the values of “extreme modernism.”