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

Charles Ferrall, Dougal McNeill

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781107145535
• eBook ISBN: 9781108751018
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Futility and Anarchy? British Literature in Transition
• Part I After the War
• Part II Literature after Human Nature Changed
• Part III Immense Panoramas of Futility and Anarchy: Writing and Politics
• Part IV The First Break-Up of Britain
• Part V Transitions High and Low
• Index