John Buchan's Amicable Anti-Modernism

Waddell, Nathan

Abstract

This article considers the novelist John Buchan’s changing responses to literary modernism in the inter-war period. It argues that although Buchan has generally been taken as a straightforward opponent of modernist writing, careful study of his oeuvre discloses a more complex scenario in which an antagonism to certain modernist 'excesses' is mixed with a qualified attraction to particular modernist innovations. The article’s central assumption is that a key part of Buchan’s worth to the New Modernist Studies lies in his querying — in novelistic as well as in essayistic forms — of the vocabularies now used to elaborate such literary-historical oppositions as high vs. low, for instance, or old vs. new. The article breaks new ground by moving beyond familiar Buchan texts — e.g. 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915) — into the less appreciated territory of his novel 'Huntingtower' (1922), his literary criticism and his cultural commentaries.

Citation

Waddell, N. (2012). John Buchan's Amicable Anti-Modernism. Journal of Modern Literature, 35(2), 64-82. https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.35.2.64

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: May 12, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: May 12, 2015
• Journal: Journal of Modern Literature
• Print ISSN: 0022-281X
• Electronic ISSN: 1529-1464
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 35
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 64-82
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.35.2.64
• Keywords: John Buchan; modernism; middlebrow; inter-war; Huntingtower
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1009441
• Publisher URL: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2979/jmodelite.35.2.64?uid=31236&uid=3738032&uid=2132&uid=31234&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=5910784&uid=67&uid=62&sid=21106374010881
• Additional Information: This article was published as Waddell, Nathan. John Buchan’s amicable anti-modernism. Journal of Modern Literature, v. 35, no. 2 (pp. 64-82) 2012.