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

Explores connections between the social and political upheavals of the interwar years and British literature in that period.

Exploring a range of forms of literature in the British Isles from 1920 to 1940, this book will interest undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of drama, English literature, gender studies, and politics. Particular attention is paid to the literatures of Wales, Ireland and Scotland, and to women's and queer writing.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.