Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics
Cambridge University Press, 2/19/2015
EAN 9781107100039, ISBN10: 1107100038
Hardcover, 236 pages, 23.5 x 16 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike. The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike, as well as the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.
1. St George and the beast
conservative responses to the Strike
2. The aesthetic fix
Wells, Chesterton, Bennett
3. In the middle way
Bloomsbury and the General Strike
4. Lady Chatterley and the end of the world
5. Poshcrats and the orphan class
the Auden circle in the General Strike
6. The General Strike and Scottish modernism
7. The education of desire
labour college radicals, the General Strike and the impossible bildungsroman
8. Remembering 1926
working-class Welsh modernisms.