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

Charles Ferrall · Dougal McNeill

Dec 2018 · Cambridge University Press

Ebook

650

Pages

About this ebook

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.

About the author

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).

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets

Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.

Laptops and computers

You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.

eReaders and other devices

To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.

Flag as inappropriate