Resumen
In this article, I suggest that Lynette Roberts develops a ?naïve? modernism that emphasizes tropes of folk art, home-made craft, and creative labour as a therapeutic response to war and a means of carving out a public role for the woman writer in the post-war world. Bringing high modernist strategies down to earth through an engagement with localized rural cultures, she strives to bridge the divide between the public and the private in order to open up a space for the woman writer within public life. As part of my discussion, I draw on Rebecca L. Walkowitz?s contention that literary style?conceived broadly as ?attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness??is crucial to modernist writers? attempts to think in?and beyond?the nation. Embracing a liberating openness to experience and ?amateurish? passion, Roberts?s ?home-made? style challenges imperial constructions of nationhood centred in authority and control with a more collective, constructivist, improvisatory concept of belonging (Roberts 2005, p. xxxvi). Probing the intersections between folk art, national commitments, and global feminist projects in British modernism, I investigate how a radically transformed ?naïve? subtends the emergence of a new kind of feminist modernism, rooted in concepts of collective making and creative labour.