British Literature in Transition, 1920–1940: Futility and Anarchy

Cambridge University Press, 12/20/2018
EAN 9781107145535, ISBN10: 1107145538

Hardcover, 384 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm
Language: English

Literature from the 'political' 1930s has often been read in contrast to the 'aesthetic' 1920s. This collection suggests a different approach. Drawing on recent work expanding our sense of the political and aesthetic energies of interwar modernisms, these chapters track transitions in British literature. The strains of national break-up, class dissension and political instability provoked a new literary order, and reading across the two decades between the wars exposes the continuing pressure of these transitions. Instead of following familiar markers - 1922, the Crash, the Spanish Civil War - or isolating particular themes from literary study, this collection takes key problems and dilemmas from literature 'in transition' and reads them across familiar and unfamiliar cultural works and productions, in their rich and contradictory context of publication. Themes such as gender, sexuality, nation and class are thus present throughout these essays. Major writers such as Woolf are read alongside forgotten and marginalised voices.

Introduction Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill
Part I. After the War
1. Out of Mrs Colefax's Drawing-Room
poets and poetry between the wars Harry Ricketts
2. Perverting the postwar
sexuality and state violence in women's literature Layne Parish Craig
3. Journeys without maps
literature and spiritual experience Lara Vetter
Part II. Literature after Human Nature Changed
4. Writing the vote
suffrage, gender, and politics Sowon S. Park and Kathryn Laing
5. Literature and human rights Rachel Potter
6. Psychoanalysis and modernism John Farrell
Part III. Immense Panoramas of Futility and Anarchy
Writing and Politics
7. History
the past in transition Gabrielle McIntire
8. Women's work? Domestic labour and proletarian fiction Charles Ferrall
9. Ordinary places, intermodern genres
documentary, travel, and literature Kristin Bluemel
10. Bloomsbury conversations that didn't happen
Indian writing between British modernism and anti-colonialism Snehal Shingavi and Charlotte Nunes
Part IV. The First Break-Up of Britain
11. Between Holyhead and Kingstown
Anglo-Irish perspectives on the character of British fiction Michael G. Cronin
12. Cancer of empire
the Glasgow novel between the wars Liam McIlvanney
13. Lewis Jones and the making of Welsh Identity Shintaro Kono
14. From Optik to Haptik
Celticism, symbols and stones in the 1930s Peter Mackay
Part V. Transitions High and Low
15. On the home front
designs for living in British drama between the wars Penny Farfan
16. Middlemen, middlebrow, broadbrow Nicola Wilson
17. Detective fiction
resolutions without solutions J. C. Bernthal
18. British literature in transmission
writing and wireless James Purdon.