The Politics of 1930s British Literature

Education, Class, Gender

Natasha Periyan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350143210
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350019867
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2018 International Standing Conference for the History of Education's First Book Award

Drawing on a rich array of archival sources and historical detail, The Politics of 1930s British Literature tells the story of a school-minded decade and illuminates new readings of the politics and aesthetics of 1930s literature.

In a period of shifting political claims, educational policy shaped writers' social and gender ideals. This book explores how a wide array of writers including Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Winifred Holtby and Graham Greene were informed by their pedagogic work. It considers the ways in which education influenced writers' analysis of literary style and their conception of future literary forms.

The Politics of 1930s British Literature argues that to those perennial symbols of the 1930s, the loudspeaker and the gramophone, should be added the textbook and the blackboard.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Key to Editorial Symbols
• Editorial Preface to Historicizing Modernism
• Introduction
• 1. W.H. Auden: Pedagogy and Freedom of Choice in the 1930s
• 2. Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain and the Politics of Pedagogy in South Riding, Honourable Estate, and Testament of Youth
• 3. Writers of The Old School: Graham Greene, Walter Greenwood, Stephen Spender, Antonia White, and Arthur Calder-Marshall
• 4. ‘Altering the Structure of Society’: Virginia Woolf’s Class-Critique of Educational Institutions in the 1930s
• 5. ‘Making Him Our Master’: Th e Eton Writers George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, and Henry Green
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index