A History of 1930s British Literature

Offers a radically new picture of the 'long 1930s', describing it as a pivot of twentieth-century literary and cultural production.

This volume offers a new and comprehensive picture of 1930s British literature, and also ambitiously recasts our understanding of twentieth-century literary and cultural history by reframing the decade. It is an excellent resource for undergraduates, graduates and scholars of 1930s British literature, and twentieth-century literature more generally.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.