My Research Proposal

I will officially be beginning my PhD at the end of the month! Now this is a certainty, I will be dedicating a lot more time to this blog. I have been writing and working on a number of posts recently, but most of them I haven't posted because they ended reading more like diary entries than expositions or analyses. I have also been working on some “Introduction” posts for various authors I'll be looking at for my PhD (aside from JCP and HR) including: Henry Treece, Nicholas Moore, E. Graham Howe, Alex Comfort, D. S. Savage, Kathleen Raine, Paul Nash as well as groups and ideas like the New Apocalypse, the Villa Seurat, some various strains of anarchist thought and Neo-romanticism. Many of these I have started writing, but I want them to be quite comprehensive accounts which other people might refer to in future – for which I personally have a lot more research and reading to do.

For now, here is my research proposal. I have an alternative version of this proposal which is a lot more in-depth and less heavy-handed in its arguments, but is twice the length of this one and far exceeded the world limit. I abandoned that version before I could properly finish it (otherwise I would post it here), but I will probably revisit it and break it up into smaller chunks for separate posts. Put as simply as possible, my project is concerned with examining the ways in which JCP and Herbert Read approach the task of life-writing, attempting to understand how these are informed by (or inform) their personal politics and writings on culture. Both authors explicitly identify as anarchist, but as is the case with this “tradition”, this can translate to a number of different modes of political, ethical and cultural engagement. The kind of anarchism these authors espoused can perhaps be best described as an “individualist” anarchism, looking to free the individual from society and the state by cultivating unique, “personal” modes of creativity which ultimately sought to be indistinct from life itself.

Whilst I find this to be a fundamental attitude behind much of their work, this type of “individualism” doesn't preclude social engagement or collective struggle. Indeed, both authors previously identified as communist before they turned to anarchism, and as far as I can tell they both stuck to the idea of a fully democratised ownership of the means of production. The precise reasons vary for why both converted from one ideology to the other, but I think can basically be summed up as stemming from a recognition of the shortcomings of orthodox Marxism and its failure to truly accommodate the different spiritual and cultural needs of the individual. Their revitalisation of “romanticism”, whilst shared by many of differing political creeds throughout the 30s and 40s, was premised on artistically elevating the emotional and temperamental experiences of the individual to a universal, communicable ideal. One must bear in mind that the bulk of their work preceded much of the now-popular critical theory and critique of culture found in Western Marxism and presents a completely different perspective on culture, which can make it difficult to integrate into modern theory. Many of the studies of Read's work have been wary of this and subsequently ask how me might approach his work today. Powys seems more to have a dedicated following independent from the academic mainstream. These are things which will be of central importance to my studies. Anyway, here is my proposal:

Spaces of the (Im)Personal: Ethics and Ecology in the Life-writings of John Cowper Powys and Herbert Read

A mind without memories means a body without sensibility; our memories make our imaginative life, and it is only as we increase our memories, widening the imbricated shutters which divide our mind from the light, that we find with quick recognition those images of truth which the world is pleased to attribute to our creative gift.

(Read, 1963: 19-20)

In the light of what I am now at sixty, taking this ambiguous “what I am” as an entirely subjective vision – for who with all his efforts can see himself objectively – such a destined direction, steered by the interior life-urge in its moulding of circumstance, takes the form of a half-conscious self-creation. And what shape, as I regard myself now, myself and what I have come to call my life-illusion, does this character-destiny assume?

(Powys, 1982: 6)

This study will seek to construct a new perspective on the life-writings of John Cowper Powys and Herbert Read, respectively; Autobiography (1934) and The Innocent Eye (1933), exploring how these texts relate to their authors' other literary works, their writings on culture and philosophy, and the later network of “Personalist” authors outlined in James Gifford's Personal Modernisms. Recent scholarship on anarchist intellectual history (see Honeywell and Adams) and literature (see Cohn and Gifford) has seen a growing body of evidence that Powys and Read were much more instrumental to the development of late modernism than has otherwise been stated in previous accounts, with recent currents in critical theory opening up exciting, new possibilities for engagement with these texts. Drawing on both authors' philosophy and cultural criticism, this project will seek to explore how the anarchist conception of culture which arises from their work informs their approach to the life-writing process. Considering the themes of romance (and romanticism), the personal, anarchism, and spatiality, this study seeks to understand how these texts can be situated in an account of British literary modernism inclusive of the personalists, as well as exploring the ways in which they might be approached by a modern readership - ascertaining the extent of their affinities with recent developments in fields such as contemporary anarchism and post-critique.  

Gifford identifies the personalists as a “deeply interconnected” international network of anti-authoritarian avant-garde writers and poets, beginning with the Villa Seurat group in Paris (including the likes of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell), leading to the New Apocalypse poets in London, the Personal Landscape poets in Egypt and the proto-San Francisco Renaissance poets - “[b]y this term (“personalist”) and moment (1930s through 1940s), I mean to emphasize their general tendency to avoid creating movements or schools, their politics of the unpolitical, and their aesthetic emphasis on the experience of the individual” (Gifford, 2017: xi). Jesse Cohn recognises this personalism as “one of the first experiments in a new form of anarchist resistance culture” (Cohn, 2013: 110), creating a strategic shift away from “large-scale labor organizing or armed confrontation toward questions of lifestyle and sexuality and experimentation in the arts”, constituting a “continuation of the social war by other means” (Cohn, 2013: 111). 

Gifford's use of the term is pragmatic and by his own admission “loose,” yet it helps to distinguish a concrete and mutually-held set of values across a network of authors which has been obscured and overlooked in existing accounts of late modernism. I use the term with similarly pragmatic intent, making thematic links between Read's and Powys's earlier work and the later groups which Gifford centres around the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, after which Read professed his anarchism publicly, following Henry Miller's denunciation of the Marxist orientation of the movement (see Miller, 1939: 151-196). Read had, at this point, already steeped himself in much of the anarchist literature which would undergird his public announcement, and The Innocent Eye (as I shall argue) demonstrates this earlier commitment to anarchist principles. Furthermore, Powys had been a huge influence on Miller, who had witnessed one of his public lectures in his youth which led him to take up a correspondence with him throughout the 1950s (See Peltier, 2014). 

I maintain that the authors' life-writings, published between 1933-4, can be understood as personalist. The themes of personal experience, anti-authoritarian approaches to creativity and spirituality which unite the anarchist works of the later 1930s and 1940s find their locus in these works. Whilst stylistically different, Read tending towards Imagistic concision and Powys towards Victorian-esque verbosity (a difference that can be understood through personalism's emphasis on individual creativity), both texts are exercises in self-mythologisation whilst also being explorations of the self through a sustained reflection of the environmental circumstances of their younger years. There is a subsequent emphasis on spatiality and place in their work, as well as connections with their other work, overall serving to disrupt not just traditional understandings of autobiography and authorship, but the relationship of author to society altogether.

Scholarship on the work of Powys and Read has been limited throughout modernist studies, with their life-writings receiving even less attention. They have largely been considered as interesting yet marginal figures, whose contributions to the development of modernism are negligible when compared with their canonical modernist contemporaries. However, this study will contend that their work significantly affected the course of modernism in Britain as well as the development of a recognisably anarchist literary tradition, and that their life-writings are essential to understanding the extent of this contribution. Larson Powell's reading of Powys typifies much of the current attitude in modernist studies, stating that his, “novels do not fully break through into that modernist Beyond of Proust, Joyce, Kafka or Musil” (Powell, 2009). His idiosyncrasies and “weird private religion” lead Powell to characterise Powys as a “modern outside modernism”. In a reading of A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Jed Esty regards him as a “monumental “minor” writer of the period”, identifying his “spiritual ambition and sheer energy […] poised between grandeur and elephantiasis” (Esty, 2003: 62), yet situates him within the “provincial English tradition of Hardy and Lawrence” (Esty, 2003: 63), ignoring the pervasive influence of his anarchist politics on the text and its anti-authoritarian experimentation with form. 

Jerome McGann has challenged this exclusion from the canon, contending that Powys is a writer “who ought to demand our greatest attention” (McGann, 2006) in accounts of literary modernism. He recognises Powys's ability to “index” and “fold” his “subjective agency” into his writing: “[t]he “author” that survives this process will not be set apart, like a god paring his fingernails. The author will find (or lose) himself in his own work, dissolved throughout” (McGann, 2006). Powys develops a personal response to modernity by re-conceptualising the relationship between literature and life, McGann essentially argues, drawing on the performative aspects of storytelling as well as notions of the author as medium. Against the elitism, or what he describes as the “aesthetic tyranny” of High Modernism, Powys conceives of the “artist as fool,” developing “a form of writing where failure stalks in every word” (McGann, 2006) - thereby foregrounding the necessity of subjectivity and internal contradiction to the creative process. Whereas for Powell the author's “presence” within the text negates its accession to the “modernist Beyond,” McGann finds that Powys occupies a different trajectory of modernism altogether. 

This trajectory might be better understood through David Goodway's exploration of Powys's philosophical work. Goodway situates Powys within a left-libertarian tradition of English writing, drawing attention to the author's earlier success as a writer of “philosophical” self-help books, seeking to communicate what he termed a “life-illusion” through a method “both readily intelligible to the ordinary man or woman and which would transform their everyday lives through a process of self-liberation” (Goodway, 2012: loc. 3125). What, for Powell, is a “weird private religion” is actually Powys's own, particular “life-illusion” – an individuated ontology cultivated through a heightened receptivity to environmental circumstance, interior self-knowledge, and personal creativity, which becomes consciously shaped through the act of writing. Yet this fundamentally anarchist perspective on creativity (and ultimately, culture) is often overlooked in readings of Powys, whereas in actuality it can be closely linked with Read's views on culture as well as those belonging to the greater network of personalist authors outlined through Gifford's two monographs, Personal Modernisms and A Modernist Fantasy. 

Read has faced a similar mixture of neglect and misrepresentation, a fact which, Carissa Honeywell argues, has stunted  the field of cultural studies since; “[a]narchism and modernism are both conceptually and historically linked, and the absence of a clearly identifiable field of anarchist cultural studies reflects the Herbert-Read-shaped gaps in the intellectual history of these movements” (Honeywell, 2011: 50). Whilst there have been a couple of edited collections of scholarship on Read, given his considerable influence on both British art and culture throughout the 1930s and 1940s and on the development of anarchist theory, the “Read-shaped gap” in most accounts of modernism seems unusual. As with Powys, I contend that his life-writings should be considered a core component of his work and necessary to understanding his personalist approach to anarchism. In one of the very few available readings of his life-writings, Peter Abbs' argues that Read's other work, including his philosophy and art criticism, “is often deeply autobiographical […]. His writing was a continuous expression of his own distinctive personality and its existential concerns” (Abbs, 1998: 83). He shares this quality with Powys and, published only a year before Autobiography, The Innocent Eye presents readers with a similarly experimental piece of life-writing. Both texts also demonstrate a significant influence from British romanticism in their mutual sense of alienation and escape into nature and the inanimate: 

But at a deeper level the pattern of generic differentiation breaks asunder to disclose a consistent autobiographical rhythm, a constellation of personal values (resting on temperament and childhood experience) and an indivisible narrative journey leading, at the end, to a profound sense of isolation from the dominant culture and an intense attachment to the flora and fauna, the buildings and paths, the streams and rivers of his local world, of his earlier childhood Paradise. 

(Abbs, 1998: 83-84) 

This description could just as well fit Autobiography - both texts are driven by a desire to place these memories in a narrative order which might confer a sense of unity, agency and meaning. The personalists' later turn towards the fantasy genre (as presented in Gifford's A Modernist Fantasy), as well as the Neo-romantic influence on children's fiction (see Campbell, 2017), is anticipated by these texts and their in-depth reflections on childhood experience, nostalgia, and the relationship between place and imagination. However, rather than this conjuring of past rural innocence representing a nostalgic retreat from modernity, these texts present a direct confrontation with the subjective dimensions of memory and consciously draw on the intellectual innovations of modernism to find a creative tension between their personal experiences and the effects of modernity. 

Their elevation of memory and nature to the realm of the spiritual might echo the romantics, but Powys and Read both drew heavily on the intellectual developments and cosmopolitan opportunities (see Wiseman) presented by modernity to theorise and put into practice a mode of cultural production aimed at a fuller realisation of anarchy. Indeed, both essentially see culture as synonymous with “creativity” and regard the notion of a separate “high culture” as being a bourgeois manifestation which, for Read, only impinges on society realising its full democratic potential (see Read, 2002: 4-5, Powys, 1974: 4). For them, the prioritisation of the “personal” and subjectivity in artistic production, responding to not just foreign totalitarian regimes, but the rise of a domestic, post-war “mass society,”  in turn necessitated anarchism. Alongside this radical perspective on culture, perhaps most concisely outlined in Powys's The Meaning of Culture (1928) and Read's To Hell With Culture (1941), life-writing becomes a radical form of creative and political agency. 

Aiming to comprehend why the work of the personalists has fared poorly among critics, Gifford's “metacritical” reading traces their marginalisation in modernist studies back to the “interpretive paradigms” originally “set in place” by the High Modernists and Auden generation preceding them. As such, personalist writers, whose work “was a crucial feature of 1930s and 1940s writing that had a broad influence and much success after the war under other guises” (Gifford, 2016: loc. 232) has been hugely misrepresented and subsequently overlooked in accounts of literary modernism. Their shared anti-authoritarian approach to form, influenced very much by Read and Powys, was rendered invisible as it failed to “function within the normative analogies of our mainstream interpretive paradigms” (Gifford, 2016: loc. 232). To address this, my interpretive methodology will be drawn from the “anarchist hermeneutics” proposed by Jesse Cohn in Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation (2010) and developed in Gifford's recuperative reading – emphasising the necessity of reconsidering the texts “in their original context without manipulation to fit into a contradictory ideology” so that they “once again become vitally alive and aesthetically engaging” (Gifford, 2016: loc. 232). 

Cohn encourages a “dialogical” rather than “ideological” reading of the text, recognising it “not so much as a container containing a message, but a space we might inhabit in a variety (but not an infinite or wholly indeterminate variety) of ways” (Cohn, 2010: 87). This method will entail the excavation of multiple meanings within the texts, where “meanings” are taken to be situationally constituted, “driven both by the intentions of interpreters and the extra-intentional reality of the situation in which interpretations happen […] In short, we hold that an actual text conditions its multiple potential meanings for different readers in different times and places” (Cohn, 2010: 83-88). As the personalists' work focuses on the cultivation of distinct, personal modes of writing, I contend that this interpretive methodology shall be the most conducive to my aims, allowing me to explore the multiplicity of textual meanings for a multiplicity of readers, whilst providing an objective grounding to situate and assess their overall contribution to modernist literature. 

As such, this project will have two primary objectives; firstly, to discover the full extent of this “original context” and establish a more accurate, nuanced account in which the themes and formal innovations of the texts can be examined in more depth and with greater clarity. This will be covered mostly in the first chapter, tentatively titled “Landscapes of Interwar Modernism,” which will encompass a range of themes related to the texts and investigate the connections between them. This will include: theories of culture, psychoanalysis, anarchism, autobiography, and Neo-romanticism. The resurgence of romanticism in the 1930s will be of particular interest as existing accounts (see Harris, 2010) often fail to distinguish the political and intellectual nuances of its composite groups and movements. Having established this intellectual and cultural context, I shall move onto my second chapter, “A Poetics of Innocence and Experience,” which will provide the main analysis of the primary texts. Seeking, as Cohn encourages, to “extrapolate critical tools from the text itself” (Cohn, 2010: 96), it will pay close attention to the texts' structural forms (or lack thereof) and use of space, connecting these with the themes developed in the first chapter, as well as examining how they relate to the authors' other literary works as well as their philosophical and critical works. 

After completing this reading and situating these texts both within the authors' oeuvres as well as the context of modernism, I will proceed to my third chapter, “Personalist Reading,” and second objective: to explore the affinities between these texts and more recent developments in critical theory and Post-critique. Given the authors' mutually-held contention that emotion and subjectivity are necessary components of the critical process - “That is the final test of criticism: that its methods are perfected in science, but that the motives are spontaneous, impulsive...” (Read, 1926: 27-28), and demonstrated  by Powys's invocation of “Charlatanry” as a term of creative empowerment – I wish to assess these claims in greater detail and explore their broader ethical implications for a contemporary readership in light of the recent discourse around “post-critical” reading. Drawing on recent developments in anarchist theory (see Cohn, Janicka, Frantzanas) as well as re-assessments of anarchist intellectual and cultural history (see Adams, Antliff, Colson, Honeywell, White), I argue that rather than representing a romantically-inclined, individualistic quietism, the authors' critical (or, for Powys, “appreciative”) work reveals a more complex commitment to the development of anarchist-modernism posited on the empowerment of the reader as a site of creative and political agency. 

Ultimately, I seek to explore how such a “personalist reader” might respond to the challenges presented by an era of Neo-liberal postmodernity and climate catastrophe. The systematic devaluation of anarchism within scholarship often effaces the otherwise clear boundaries between the anarchist “un-political” and the capitalist “apolitical”, often to the detriment of authors like Powys and Read whose anarchism often transcends the immediate political sphere to concentrate on the ontological aspects of anarchy. My intention is, to find not a “synthesis” but a “productive tension” (Cohn, 2010: 97) in which the ethical and ecological possibilities of the texts can be realised, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the text as a site of contradiction and autonomy. I maintain that a dialogical interpretation, as I have proposed here, which posits the authors' life-writings as central to understanding their contribution to anarchist-modernism, will not only help to foster further discussion around the status of the wider “personalist” network, but will also contribute to the discourse around (post)critical hermeneutics and its ethical and ecological commitments.

Prospective Bibliography

Abbs, P. (1998) 'Herbert Read as Autobiographer' in Goodway D. (ed.) Read Re-Assessed, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 

Adams, M. S. (2013) 'The Possibilities of Anarchist History: Rethinking the Canon and Writing History' in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 2013(1): 33-63. 

Adams, M. S. (2015) Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Adams, M. S. (2015) 'To Hell With Culture: Fascism, Rhetoric, and the War for Democracy', in Anarchist Studies: Herbert Read Special Issue, 23(2): 18-37. 

Adams, M. S. (2020) 'Mutualism in the trenches: Anarchism, militarism and the lessons of the First World War' in Kinna R, & Adams, M. S. (eds.) Anarchism 1914-1918: Internationalism, anti-militarism and war, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 

Alexander N. & Moran J. (eds.) (2013) Regional Modernisms, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Antliff, A. (2007) Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. 

Antliff, M. (2020) 'Pacifism, Realism, and Pathology: Alex Comfort, Cecil Collins, and Neo-Romantic Art during World War II' in Modernism/modernity, 27(3): 519-549.

Ashmore, P. (2013) 'Not a Drama: Things Affect in Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye', in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31(5): 935-950. 

Campbell, N. (2017) 'Children's Neo-Romanticism: The Archaeological Imagination in British post-War children's fantasy' [PhD thesis] Awarding Institution: University of Roehampton. 

Casaliggi, C. & March-Russell, P. (eds.) (2012) Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics, London: Routledge. 

Caserio, R. (2014) 'Powys among the Autobiographers, 1900-1940', The Powys Journal, 24: 44-66.

Casey, E. (2009) Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Child, D. (2015) 'To Hell with (the contemporary commodification of) Culture!' in Anarchist Studies, 23(2): 10-17.  

Cohn, J. (2010) Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics, Cranbury: Associated University Press. 

Cohn, J. (2013) 'Surrealists and Anarchists, Affinities and Resistances: A Response' in Global Review: A Biannual Special Topics Journal, 1(1): 107-114. 

Cohn, J. (2015) Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011, California: AK Press. 

Colson, D. (trans. Cohn, J.) (2019) A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze, Colchester: Minor Compositions. 

Cook, D. (1974) 'The “Autobiography” of John Cowper Powys: A Portrait of the Artist as Other' in Modern Philology, 72(1): 30-44. 

Esty, J. (2003) A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Fawkner, H. W. (1986) The Ecstatic World of John Cowper Powys, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 

Fawkner, H. W. (2007) Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestations of Affectivity, Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing. 

Felski, R. (2015) The Limits of Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Finney, B. (1985) The Inner I: British Literary Autobiography of the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Frantzanas, S. (2019) Redefining Anarchy: from Metaphysics to Politics, PhD thesis by University of Glasgow. 

Gifford, T. (2014) Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes, Alberta: The University of Alberta Press. 

Gifford, T. (2018) A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism and the Radical Fantastic, Victoria: ELS Editions. 

Goodway, D. (ed.) (1998) Read Re-Assessed, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 

Goodway, D. (2012) Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward [e-book], Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 

Goodwin, J. (2007) ‘Nationalism and Re-enchantment in John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance’, The Powys Journal, 17: 115-132. 

Harris, A. (2010) Romantic Moderns, London: Thames & Hudson. 

Hauser, K. (2007) Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape 1927-1955, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Honeywell, C. (2011) A British Anarchist Tradition: Herbert Read, Alex Comfort and Colin Ward, London: Bloomsbury.

Hooker, J. (1996) Writers in a Landscape, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 

Janicka, I. (2017) Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism: Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change, London: Bloomsbury. 

Kadlec, D. (2000) Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture, Michigan: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Keery, J. (2003) ''The Burning Baby' and the Bathwater', in PN Review 150, 29(4): ?. 

Keery, J. (ed.) Apocalypse: An Anthology, Manchester: Carcanet. 

Keith, W. J. (2007) 'Coming to Terms with John Cowper Powys's Autobiography', The Powys Journal, 17: 41-60. 

Keith, W. J. (2009) 'John Cowper Powys and 'Other Dimensions': The evidence from his fiction', The Powys Journal, 19: 36-54. 

Kilian, E. & Wolf, H. (eds.) (2016) Life Writing and Space, London: Routledge. 

King, J. (1990) The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 

Krissdóttir, M. (1980) John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest, London: Macdonald General Books. 

Krissdóttir, M. (2007) Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys, London: Overlook Duckworth. 

Lock, C. (2019) 'Diversions and Digressions: What Happens in the reading of A Glastonbury Romance', in The Powys Journal, 29: 28-56. 

Malpas, J. (2018) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, London: Routledge. 

Marshall, P. (1991) Demanding The Impossible: A History of Anarchism, New York: HarperCollins. 

Matless, D. (1998) Landscape and Englishness, London: Reaktion Books. 

McCarthy, J. M. (2015) Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel 1900-1930, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

McGann, J. (2006) '”The Grand Heretics of Modern Fiction”: Laura Riding, John Cowper Powys, and the Subjective Correlative', in Modernism/Modernity, 13(2): 309-323.

Miller, H. (1939) The Cosmological Eye, Norfolk: New Directions Books. 

Murphy, E. (2014) Unmaking Merlin: Anarchist Tendencies in English Literature [e-book], Alresford: Zero Books. 

Murphy, E. (2018) 'Anarchy and Identity: on Power and Loneliness in the works of John Cowper Powys', The Powys Journal, 28: 120-139.  

Nash, K. S. (2007) 'Narrative Progression and Receptivity: John Cowper Powys's “A Glastonbury Romance”', in Narrative, 15(1): 4-23.

Paraskos, M. (2007) Rereading Read: New Views on Herbert Read, London: The Freedom Press. 

Peltier, J. (2014) Proteus and the Magician: The Letters of Henry Miller and John Cowper Powys, Bath: The Powys Society. 

Powell, L. (2009) 'A Modern Outside Modernism: J. C. Powys', Nebula, 6(4): 175-?

Powys, J. C. (1974) The Meaning of Culture, London: Village Press. 

Powys, J. C. (1974) Visions and Revisions, London: Village Press. 

Powys, J. C. (1983) Obstinate Cymric, London: Village Press. 

Powys, J. C. (1982) Autobiography, London: Picador. 

Radford, A. (2010) Mapping the Wessex Novel: Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870-1940, London: Continuum. 

Radford, A. (2014) Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place, London: Continuum. 

Read, H. (1926) Reason and Romanticism, London: Faber and Gwyer. 

Read, H. (1963) The Contrary Experience: autobiographies by Herbert Read, London: Faber and Faber. 

Read, H. (1964) The Philosophy of Modern Art, London: Faber and Faber. 

Read, H. (1994) Selected Poetry, London: Sinclair-Stevenson. 

Springer, S. (2016) The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Tally Jr., R. T. (2012) Spatiality, London: Routledge. 

Tally Jr. R. T. (ed.) (2020) Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Studies to Space, Geography, and the Imagination, London: Routledge. 

Thacker, A. (2003) Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 

Thistlewood, D. (1984) Herbert Read: Formlessness and Form: An Introduction to His Aesthetics, Abingdon: Routledge. 

Tigges, W. (1991) ‘“Earthquakes never occur in England”; Or, “Perhaps I can help?”: The Ambivalence of the Revolutionary in Herbert Read’s The Green Child’, in Barfoot, C. C. & D’haen T. (eds.) Tropes of Revolution: Writers’ Reaction to Real and Imagined Revolutions, Amsterdam: Rodopi. 

Treece, H. (ed.) (1944) Herbert Read: An introduction to his work by various hands, London: Faber and Faber. 

Treece, H & Schimanski (ed.) (1949) A New Romantic Anthology, London: The Grey Walls Press. 

Trentmann, F. (1994) ‘Civilization and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture’, in Journal of Contemporary History, 29(4): 583-625. 

Wasson,R. (1962) ‘The Green Child: Herbert Read’s Ironic Fantasy’, PMLA 77(5): 645-651. 

Wheatley, K. (2017) 'John Cowper Powys and the Inhuman Wordsworth', in European Romantic Review, 28(6): 773-788. 

Wiseman, S. (2015) The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Wood, M. S. (2017) The Ecological Imagination of John Cowper Powys: Writing, 'Nature', and the Non-human, PhD thesis awarded by The University of Leeds. 

Woodcock, G. (2008) Herbert Read: The Stream and the Source, Montreal: Black Rose Books. 

Yorke, M. (1988) The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic artists and their times, London: Constable.