Mediating Culture: Modernism, the Arts and the Woman Reader

Abstract

This chapter examines Time and Tide’s early music, theatre, film and book reviews – a treasure-trove for exploring trends in interwar literature and the arts as well as debates about the nature and function of criticism itself. Focusing on the contributions of regular columnists including Christopher St John (née Christabel Marshall) and Sylvia Lynd the chapter discusses Time and Tide’s mediation of culture ranging from the modernist and ‘avant-garde’ to the ‘middlebrow’ and popular and posits that its position is identifiably feminist both in terms of its promotion of women in the cultural sphere and in its responses to developments in criticism in the interwar years. Engaging with such topics as the well-known ‘romanticism versus classicism’ debate and modernism’s ‘problem with pleasure’ (Frost 2013), the chapter demonstrates Time and Tide’s commitment both to educating the woman reader in a higher culture and defending traditional reading pleasures.