Part of
Children's Literature and the Avant-GardeEdited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 5] 2015
► pp. 89–110
This chapter considers the British interpretation of avant-garde, here called ‘romantic Modernism’, as it was manifested in children’s literature during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Since all of the children’s books featured in the chapter as well as their writers and illustrators have been neglected by standard histories, the chapter is an exercise in literary recovery as much as an analysis of individual texts. It demonstrates interaction between writing and illustration for children and avant-garde arts and letters in Britain during these years.