A History of 1930s British Literature
A History of 1930s British Literature

Author: Benjamin Kohlmann

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-05-16

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1316998762

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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.

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

Author: Charles Ferrall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-12-20

Total Pages: 733

ISBN-13: 1108751415

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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.

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing

Author: Susheila Nasta

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-16

Total Pages: 862

ISBN-13: 1108169007

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The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.

British Literature and the Life of Institutions
British Literature and the Life of Institutions

Author: Benjamin Kohlmann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-11-25

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0192573187

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British Literature and the Life of Institutions charts a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900, but it also marks a major intervention in current theoretical debates about critique and the dialectical imagination. By placing literary studies in dialogue with political theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, the book reclaims a substantive reformist language that we have ignored to our own loss. This reformist idiom made it possible to imagine the state as a speculative and aspirational idea—as a fully realized form of life rather than as an uninspiring ensemble of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. This volume traces the resonances of this idiom from the Victorian period to modernism, ranging from Mary Augusta Ward, George Gissing, and H. G. Wells, to Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf. Compared to this reformist language, the economism that dominates current debates about the welfare state signals an impoverishment that is at once intellectual, cultural, and political. Critiquing the shortcomings of the welfare state comes naturally to us, but we often struggle to offer up convincing defences of its principles and aims. This book intervenes in these debates by urging a richer understanding of critique: if we want to defend the state, Kohlmann argues, we need to learn to think about it again.

The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction
The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

Author: Nick Hubble

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1350079154

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With austerity biting hard and fascism on the march at home and abroad, the Britain of the 1930s grappled with many problems familiar to us today. Moving beyond the traditional focus on 'the Auden generation', this book surveys the literature of the period in all its diversity, from working class, women, queer and postcolonial writers to popular crime and thriller novels. In this way, the book explores the uneven processes of modernization and cultural democratization that characterized the decade. A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, the book covers such writers as Eric Ambler, Mulk Raj Anand, Katharine Burdekin, Agatha Christie, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Christopher Isherwood, Storm Jameson, Ethel Mannin, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christina Stead, Evelyn Waugh and many others.

The Routledge History of Literature in English
The Routledge History of Literature in English

Author: Ronald Carter

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 598

ISBN-13: 9780415243179

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This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.

British Writers of the Thirties
British Writers of the Thirties

Author: Valentine Cunningham

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 9780192826558

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This wide-ranging study of British writers and poets of the 1930s--including Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Waugh, and Greene-- examines the masterpieces of that momentous decade, not in linguistic isolation, but in the contexts--social, political, historical, ideological, and personal--in which they were composed. Cunningham maps out the dominant images and concerns, nothing less than the central obsessions and imposing images of the '30s imagination. He analyzes the obsession with violence, the "destructive element" of post-World War consciousness; the cult of youth, of schools and schoolmasters; the infatuation with heroes--flyers, mountaineers, and racing car drivers--and the related concern about "being small," weak, or neurotic in an age of mass politics. In order to illustrate this kaleidoscope of themes, Cunningham examines not only the canonical texts, but also "minor" forms and writings, including detective stories, films, and popular songs, showing how these neglected genres also illuminate the work of this period.

Committed Styles
Committed Styles

Author: Benjamin Kohlmann

Publisher: Oxford English Monographs

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0198715463

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Committed Styles offers a new understanding of the politicized literature of the 1930s and its relationship to modernism. It reclaims a central body of literary and critical works for modernist studies, offering in-depth readings of texts by T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards, as well as by key left-wing authors including William Empson, David Gascoyne, Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings, and Edward Upward. Building on substantial new archival research, Benjamin Kohlmann explores the deep tensions between modernist experimentation and political vision that lie at the heart of these works. Taking as its focus the work of these writers, the book argues that the close interactions between literary production, critical reflection, and political activism in the decade shaped the influential view of modernism as fundamentally apolitical. Intervening in debates about the long life of modernism, it contends that we need to take seriously the anti-modernist impulse of 1930s left-wing literature even when attention is paid to the formal complexity of these 'committed' works. The tonal ambiguities which run through the politicised literature of the 1930s thus effect not a disengagement from but a more thorough immersion in the profoundly conflicted political commitments of the decade. At the same time, the study shows that debates about the politics of writing in the 1930s continue to inform current debates about the relationship between literature and political commitment.