Abstract: The single-day novel form enjoyed increasing prominence in the 1930s, shadowed by global crisis and economic collapse. Storm Jameson's A Day Off and Henry Green's Party Going stage everyday leisure as compensatory fantasy and ironic critique of capitalism, playing on what Theodor Adorno calls work's "rigorous bifurcation of life." This essay reads these novels in tandem to trace a parallel between modernist ideals of aesthetic autonomy and popular desires for free time. Labor reappears as the return of the repressed in these novels, illuminating the day novel's underacknowledged centrality to early twentieth-century literary history beyond the modernist paradigm.
Aidan Watson-Morris (Sun,) studied this question.
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