Committed Styles

This highly original study challenges widely held assumptions about 1930s writing ... Benjamin Kohlmann brings knowledge and insight to this seemingly inexhaustible subject in a scrupulously researched and richly rewarding study of a period that seems both remote and ominously closer. * David Collard, The Times Literary Supplement *
The account of the way in which writers turned to politics is one of the book's finest achievements ... The book opens up debate about 1930s political writing by showing that the decade's battle-lines were less clear than has been supposed. In this the book is highly successful: its readings are astute, its arguments elegant. * Boris Jardine, Modernist Cultures *
Kohlmann's study traces in fascinating detail the extent, complexity and significance of Richards's ideas for a group of writers, who contributed to an enormous amount of contemporary debate about literature and politics ... The project of Kohlmann's book is an important and thoroughly realised one ... [There are] illuminating analyses of individual creative works always with a careful sense of the influence of unfolding historical events. * Chris Hopkins, Literature and History *
Kohlmann's subtle and extremely informative study of the literature of the 1930s addresses the uses to which literature was put ... This study is invaluable for scholars of 1930s literature interested in the relationship between literary production, critical reflection and political activism. * Jane Mattison Ekstam, Ostrava Journal of English Philology *
Each richly historicised chapter of Kohlmann's book has something fresh and interesting to say about the literary and cultural climate of the interwar period. This is an original, subtle, and very stylish contribution to the study not only of British literature in the 1930s, but of the history of English criticism too. * Marina MacKay, Durham University *
... an important and useful book, one which I hope will contribute to the continuing attempt to break down barriers between modernism and left-wing commitment, between the twenties and thirties (and after), and perhaps even the recognition that the same problems still face writers today. * Ian Patterson, Review of English Studies *
Kohlmann's prose is consistently lucid and precise ... Committed Styles challenges dominant conceptions of interwar literature. It opens the way for a more generous, diverse, and challenging view of the decade and a renewed engagement with political literature more generally. Scholarly, perceptive, and carefully argued, it deserves to be widely read. * Ben Clarke, Twentieth-Century Literature *