Writing out of the Center: English Interwar Authors Reflect on the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution

“Writing out of the Center,” analyzes the way in which five interwar novelists adopted the travel book genre to examine the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1940. Although Greene, Huxley, Lawrence, Lowry and Waugh straddle the border between modernism, thriller, and post-modernism, they converge on the use of the travelogue, a genre they change in key ways. Travel writing gained cultural traction when major literary figures adopted the form and transplanted modernist techniques to their travelogues. My aim with the project is to extract a theory of otherness, violence and disgust from the fictional and non-fictional accounts of their sojourn through Mexico during this turbulent time of its history. For this end I bring in historians’ methods and findings on the impact of Mexico’s development in the 20^th century. Even though U.S.-Mexican relations tend to overshadow British-Mexican affairs, I re-center the formation and break of diplomatic contact between the two nations. Mexico’s modernization had far-reaching ideological, literary and even environmental impact. While explanations of racism are abundant, my work adds nuance by looking at the particular relationship between English and Mexican ingenious movements. In keeping with the modernist idea of the self, one which is thought of as fragmented, these writers find that they cannot hold a monolithic way of relating to the Mexican Other. For some time before their visit to Mexico, these writers were trying to create a version of indigenous Englishness—a trend which would arise again in the end of the 20^th century and continues until today in many parts of the world. Mexico’s active cultivation of both modernity (via industrialization) and indigenousness (via the Native Mexican) gave these writers a model to articulate their idea of native English identity. My research makes an intervention in the field of modernist studies since it tests the bridge between phenomenology and post colonial studies.