Literature of the 1930s: Border Country

Provides consistently nuanced readings of individual texts as well as a broad view of the whole field of British writing during the period. Organized around topics, with each chapter covering a mix of genres and discourses and ranging across the period from beginning to end. Compares developments in the literary field with those in music, art, cinema and photography. Pays close attention to key texts of the period, some by well-known writers, others by neglected figures.

This book provides consistently nuanced readings of individual texts as well as a broad view of the whole field of British writing during the period 1930s .The writing of the 1930s is the record of a time dominated by a sense of being caught between different times and places; between two world wars between generations, between modernism and realism, between middle class and working class, between local and national cultures and between national and international politics. British Literature showed more overt engagement with radical politics than ever before or since while also testing the uses and limits of difficulty, encryption and the legacy of modernism. Too often thought of as a period defined by the preoccupations of a handful of prestigious writers, the decade of the 1930s is here re-read in ways that relate these preoccupations to popular cultural emphases as well as to international debates, attending to middlebrow tastes as well as to avant- garde experimentation, and recognizing the significance of regional emphases and issues of gender.