The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

Description

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.

Nick Hubble is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English at Brunel University London, UK and the co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015) and London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016) all published by Bloomsbury. Luke Seaber is Tutor in Modern European Culture at University College London, UK. He is the author of Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (2017). Elinor Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Westminster, UK. She is the author of The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940 (2018).

Too long caricatured as an anomalous 'Red Decade', the real importance of the 1930s as a node of twentieth-century literary and cultural production can no longer be in doubt. The insightful contributions to this volume turn to works that have tended to fall by the wayside of literary historiography. In reclaiming a rich body of middlebrow, queer, working-class, and feminist writings, this superb collection explains how and why the '30s should matter to us. -- Benjamin Kohlmann, Professor of English Literature, University of Regensburg, Germany This bold addition to the Bloomsbury Decades Series transforms the weary "Thirties" into an intriguing new literary period. It presents cutting-edge research on queer, proletarian, anti-racist, and feminist writings that encompass bourgeois modernism while speaking directly to twenty-first century dreams of a liberated future. -- Kristin Bluemel, Professor of English, Monmouth University, USA