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

Description

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.

Charles Ferrall is Associate Professor of English, Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (Cambridge, 2001) and, with Dougal McNeill, Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge, 2015). He is editor of the Journal of New Zealand Literature, and is currently working on a study of working-class interwar British literature. Dougal McNeill is Senior Lecturer in English, Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author, with Charles Ferrall, of Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge, 2015). Other books of his include Forecasts of the Past: Globalisation, History, Realism, Utopia (2012) and an edition of Harry Holland's Robert Burns: Poet and Revolutionist (2016).

'The underlying editorial argument is consistently evident through the book, offering the reader a satisfying sense of congruence and coherence across parts and chapters. The authors also do justice to the aim of the 'British Literature in Transition' series 'to understand literature's role in mediating the developments of the past hundred years ... there is much to admire in the way contributors manage to weave together literary works and the social and political histories of the day.' Brian Elliott, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books