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.
Author(s): Luke Seaber (editor), Elinor Taylor (editor)
Series: (The Decades Series)
Edition: 1
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 320
Tags: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Modernism
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface
Works cited
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The 1930s in the Twenty-First Century
Critical reception of the 1930s
The 1930s, canonicity and genre fiction
The 1930s: A decade of modern British fiction
Notes
Works cited
1 ‘You’re Not in the Market at Shielding, Joe’: Beyond the Myth of the ‘Thirties’
I suppose we’re all for ourselves in this world?
The social turn
Women and the moral revolution
The national turn
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
2 Spectres of English Fascism: History, Aesthetics and Cultural Critique
Introduction: Fascism, futurity and English culture
Storm Jameson, In the Second Year (1936)
Clemence Dane, The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939)
Rex Warner, The Aerodrome (1941)
Conclusion
Works cited
3 Naomi Mitchison, Eugenics and the Community: The Class and Gender Politics of Intelligence
Comments on Birth Control and The Corn King and the Spring Queen: Knowledge, social class and fertility
An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents: Eugenics and the community
We Have Been Warned: Community, inheritance and female intelligence
Education, intelligence and meritocratic communities
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Archives
4 British Culture and Identity in 1930s Anglophone Literature from Australia, Canada and India
Introduction
Major historical events that impacted the cultural and political identity of the Empire
How literature represents the relationship between the Empire and its colonies and settlements
Trends and titles from the peripheries
Australia and Englishness: A complex conjugation of nationalism, nativism and imperial identity
Anglophile Canada and Canadian literary imagination of Englishness and the British Empire
South Asian experience of British colonialism and its literary imagination of Englishness
A comparative overview
The legacy of the periphery
Conclusion: Why should we focus on the voices from the peripheries?
Works cited
5 Timely Interventions: Queer Writing of the 1930s
Documentary and class-crossing contacts
Female civilization and its discontents
Some more queer bonding
Speaking frankly
Works cited
6 Private Faces in Public Places: Auto-Intertextuality, Authority and 1930s Fiction
Notes
Works cited
7 ‘How To Acquire Culture’ by The Man Who Sees: The Middlebrow, Liberal Humanism, and Morally Superior Lower-Middle-Class Citizenship in Woman’s Weekly, 1938–1939
The interwar middle classes
A lower-middle-class magazine
The Man Who Sees
‘How To Acquire Culture’
Culture and citizenship
War
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
8 ‘It’s a Narsty Biziness’: Conservatism and Subversion in 1930s Detective Fiction and Thrillers
Agatha Christie: Marple, Poirot and ‘playing the game’
The jobbing writer
The firebrand
The rival queen
The eccentric
The pseudonymous poet
And then there was one
The thriller
Notes
Works cited
Timeline of Works
Timeline of National Events
Timeline of International Events
Biographies of Writers
Index
