Reading Global Anti-Fascism in 1930s British Publishing: New Writing Magazine Across Formats and Archives

• Joe McLaughlin
• Claire Battershill

In this essay we argue that in order to understand global modernism, we need to engage with literary modernists’ own writings on globalism. We situate modernist books and periodicals as objects enmeshed in an emerging international book market and themat-ically concerned with literature’s potential to make change in a hostile political world specifically in the context of world war. The anti-fascist journal New Writing, edited by John Lehmann and published by various publishers in England and distributed globally, acts as a site for debates about internationalism and globalism in the 1930s and 40s. The journal published works by literary figures such as W. H. Auden, Ahmed Ali, George Orwell, Elizbeth Bowen, and others, and its mandate was to publish new writing from around the world by writers who were specifically positioning themselves against fascism. In reading the magazine now, we assess the complexity, multi-materiality, and slipperiness of digital and physical archives as sources of literary and cultural history, focusing on New Writing’s archival presence in the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) and drawing on sources from three of that resource’s main partner libraries (the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Reading’s Archive of British Publishing and Printing, and the E. J. Pratt Library at the University of Toronto). We argue that historical research collections as sites that are themselves products of contemporary global networks and that offer often conflicting and multi-layered definitions of internationalism that create palimpsests of global political and literary collaborations.