La France a l'heure Anglaise: Embodied Timescapes and Occupied Landscapes in Storm Jameson's Cloudless May

The cultural phenomenology of the 1930s and 1940s emphasized British history as the slow accumulation of centuries of civilization, which was about to be swept away by fascism and Nazism. Anxiety about this temporal rupture informs Storm Jameson's Cloudless May, which is set in France on the cusp of the armistice. This article argues that the novel is as much about wartime in France as it is about wartime in Britain. Through affective, embodied timescapes and landscapes, it reaches out to a British readership at a time when the relationship between the two countries was at an uncertain and trying standstill. Portraying an internationalized regional consciousness, Jameson reconciles geopolitical and artistic concerns to fashion together a form of politically-engaged, experimental writing in the late modernism of the Second World War.