Bio
Professor Thacker’s main area of research is upon all areas of modernism and modernist culture, with a particular emphasis upon institutions of modernism such as magazines and bookshops. He has published many books and articles on modernism, including the monographs, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003) and The Imagist Poets (2011), and the edited / co-edited volumes, James Joyce’s Dubliners (2006) and Geographies of Modernism (2005). Professor Thacker has taught at De Montfort University and the University of Ulster and was the first elected Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies. He was co-director of the AHRC-funded Modernist Magazines Project and edits the long-running interdisciplinary journal, Literature & History.
The World Perspective: Mid-Century Modernism, John Lehmann, and The London Magazine
This paper considers the question of mid-century modernism in Britain as articulated in the pages of The London Magazine, founded by John Lehmann in 1954. In his opening editorial Lehmann situated English literature strongly within a wider geographical framework: ‘without some sense of its European perspective English literature and thought have always in the past tended to be sorely impoverished, and…today and in the future the world perspective is necessary beyond the European.’ This paper thus considers how this ‘world perspective’ was addressed in the pages of the London Magazine, examining in particular the use of translated work within the journal.