A History of 1930s British Literature

A History of 1930s British Literature PDF

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.

After the Trauma

After the Trauma PDF

Author: Harvey Curtis Webster

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0813186803

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In this lucid book a distinguished scholar and critic measures British fiction from World War I through the convulsive effects of the Depression and World War II, and the importance of the writing that has been done since Finnegan's Wake. Webster presents a moving account of the shattering impact of the Great War upon British writers, particularly Rose Macaulay, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. The cynicism and despair which afflicted them also bore heavily on the novelists of the thirties and forties—Graham Greene, Joyce Cary, L. P. Hartley, C. P. Snow, who endured the disorder and violence of the Depression and World War II. Though all of these writers spoke with individual voices ranging from pessimism to joyful affirmation, they were all marked ineradicably by the turmoil of the period. The book closes with an overview of the writers who have developed since World War II. Penetrating, fresh, affirmative in its values, the book is an important assessment of this protean group of writers.

British Writers of the Thirties

British Writers of the Thirties PDF

Author: Valentine Cunningham

Publisher: Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York : Oxford University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13:

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This wide-ranging study of British writers of the 1930s 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.

Women Writers of the 1930s

Women Writers of the 1930s PDF

Author: Maroula Joannou

Publisher: Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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This volume of new writings has a double purpose: to question Auden's description of the 1930s as a 'low dishonest decade' and to draw attention to the richness, complexity and diversity of women's writing of the period and how this deals with issues of politics, gender and history. The writers discussed include Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Burdekin, Nancy Cunard, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf.Key Features* A clear and informative introduction by Maroula Joannou sets the writers in historical and literary context* The essays deal with Modernist texts as well as traditional modes of writing, and with neglected and well-known writers* An important challenge to the ways in which the literature of the 1930s has been traditionally understood which questions the myth of the Auden generation* Brings together a range of distinguished contributors all of whom are experienced university teachers who all contribute new research

The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction PDF

Author: Nick Hubble

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1350079162

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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.

I Capture the Castle

I Capture the Castle PDF

Author: Dodie Smith

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2003-04-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1466842121

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One of the 20th Century's most beloved novels is still winning hearts! I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has "captured the castle"-- and the heart of the reader-- in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments. “This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met.” -- J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper PDF

Author: Alexandra Harris

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 0500778434

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Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties. In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops. Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately, wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern” need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest. A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

Literature of the 1920s

Literature of the 1920s PDF

Author: Chris Baldick

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2015-04-30

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0748674578

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The first general account of Twenties literature in Britain