"Mid-Century Romance chronicles a revival of the historical novel at the intersection of British late modernism and international communist culture. It frames this mid-century renovation of the genre as a response to a national turn in world politics, and this turn as a function of realignment in the imperial and literary world-systems. Confronted with the turbulence of mid-century history, writers embraced the historical novel to float narratives of national becoming and to locate their readers in the pattern of social change. Many were mindful of the genre's romantic-era history: they saw themselves following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and his heirs in other countries, and they drew on the same rescued remains of primitive poetry and popular antiquities that romanticism first used to construct its versions of national identity, of national culture and tradition. The study shows how the impulse to salvage traces of ancestral culture and to press them to new purpose links the mid-century historical novel to the rise of two of the most important post-war critical and creative projects: history from below and magical realism. It argues for the period-centrality of the mid-century national-historical novel and situates its cast of British writers - the modernists Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf, the communists Sylvia Townsend Warner and Jack Lindsay, the oddball modernist and onetime fellow traveller John Cowper Powys, and many others in less detail - in a comparative, transnational perspective"--