A History of 1930s British Literature

Benjamin Kohlmann, Matthew Taunton

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108474535
• eBook ISBN: 9781108575942
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This History offers a new and comprehensive picture of 1930s British literature. The '30s have often been cast as a literary-historical anomaly, either as a 'low, dishonest decade', a doomed experiment in combining art and politics, or as a 'late modernist' afterthought to the intense period of artistic experimentation in the 1920s. By contrast, the contributors to this volume explore the contours of a 'long 1930s' by repositioning the decade and its characteristic concerns at the heart of twentieth-century literary history. This book expands the range of writers covered, moving beyond a narrow focus on towering canonical figures to draw in a more diverse cast of characters, in terms of race, gender, class, and forms of artistic expression. The book's four sections emphasize the decade's characteristic geographical and sexual identities; the new media landscapes and institutional settings its writers operated in; questions of commitment and autonomy; and British writing's international entanglements.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: the Long 1930s
• Part I Mapping a New Decade: Geographies and Identities
• Part II Media Histories and the Institutions of Literature
• Part III Commitment and Autonomy
• Part IV The Global 1930s: Conflict and Change
• Bibliography
• Index