Abstract
This chapter discusses what it calls ‘groundmindedness’ and the introduction to literature of a new visual subject. The emphasis on groundmindedness—a complement to and alternative means of understanding airmindedness—gives an importance to flying that lies not just in itself, not just in symbolic airmen and technological modernity, but in what flying made possible: the landscape as seen from the sky. This view of the Earth’s surface is quite literally a new way of looking at the world, one that combines movement and distance. The chapter begins by examining T. H. White’s England Have My Bones (1936) before analysing Ginger and Nina’s honeymoon flight in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), and looking at groundminded imagery in the poetry of W. H. Auden.
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Seaber, L. (2020). ‘From This New Culture of the Air We Finally See’: ‘Groundmindedness’ in the 1930s. In: McCluskey, M., Seaber, L. (eds) Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_3
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