Henry Green’s Investments

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Abstract

Placing his oeuvre in a longue durée of capital and class relations, this article develops the recent contextual turn in the study of Henry Green, and hazards a materialist account of his style, focusing especially on his memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), and breakthrough novel, Living (1929). It revises the usual story, that Green’s literary modernism transcended, disrupted, or was irreconcilably at odds with his pin-striped, pro-business conservatism, arguing for homology and equivalence, not rupture or division, between his investments, commercial and aesthetic. Like Green’s unmodernist turn to business, the notoriously idiomatic, knotty, modernist style that defined Green’s most characteristic writing—the seven books published between 1929 and 1948—represents at a formal level a complex act of mediating—of simultaneously registering and resisting—the broadly democratizing economic, political, social and cultural processes transforming interwar Britain. Methodologically, the analysis supports a renewed emphasis on form, literary and linguistic, in materialist criticism of modernism and its moment.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to) 807-829
JournalModernism/Modernity
Volume30
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2023

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