A History of 1930s British Literature

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.