The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

Description

With austerity biting hard and fascism on the march at home and abroad, the Britain of the 1930s grappled with many problems familiar to us today. Moving beyond the traditional focus on ‘the Auden generation’, this book surveys the literature of the period in all its diversity, from working class, women, queer and postcolonial writers to popular crime and thriller novels. In this way, the book explores the uneven processes of modernization and cultural democratization that characterized the decade. A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, the book covers such writers as Eric Ambler, Mulk Raj Anand, Katharine Burdekin, Agatha Christie, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Christopher Isherwood, Storm Jameson, Ethel Mannin, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christina Stead, Evelyn Waugh and many others. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Contents Series Editors’ Preface Works cited Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: The 1930s in the Twenty-First Century Critical reception of the 1930s The 1930s, canonicity and genre fiction The 1930s: A decade of modern British fiction Notes Works cited 1 ‘You’re Not in the Market at Shielding, Joe’: Beyond the Myth of the ‘Thirties’ I suppose we’re all for ourselves in this world? The social turn Women and the moral revolution The national turn Conclusion Notes Works cited 2 Spectres of English Fascism: History, Aesthetics and Cultural Critique Introduction: Fascism, futurity and English culture Storm Jameson, In the Second Year (1936) Clemence Dane, The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939) Rex Warner, The Aerodrome (1941) Conclusion Works cited 3 Naomi Mitchison, Eugenics and the Community: The Class and Gender Politics of Intelligence Comments on Birth Control and The Corn King and the Spring Queen: Knowledge, social class and fertility An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents: Eugenics and the community We Have Been Warned: Community, inheritance and female intelligence Education, intelligence and meritocratic communities Conclusion Notes Works cited Archives 4 British Culture and Identity in 1930s Anglophone Literature from Australia, Canada and India Introduction Major historical events that impacted the cultural and political identity of the Empire How literature represents the relationship between the Empire and its colonies and settlements Trends and titles from the peripheries Australia and Englishness: A complex conjugation of nationalism, nativism and imperial identity Anglophile Canada and Canadian literary imagination of Englishness and the British Empire South Asian experience of British colonialism and its literary imagination of Englishness A comparative overview The legacy of the periphery Conclusion: Why should we focus on the voices from the peripheries? Works cited 5 Timely Interventions: Queer Writing of the 1930s Documentary and class-crossing contacts Female civilization and its discontents Some more queer bonding Speaking frankly Works cited 6 Private Faces in Public Places: Auto-Intertextuality, Authority and 1930s Fiction Notes Works cited 7 ‘How To Acquire Culture’ by The Man Who Sees: The Middlebrow, Liberal Humanism, and Morally Superior Lower-Middle-Class Citizenship in Woman’s Weekly, 1938–1939 The interwar middle classes A lower-middle-class magazine The Man Who Sees ‘How To Acquire Culture’ Culture and citizenship War Conclusion Notes Works cited 8 ‘It’s a Narsty Biziness’: Conservatism and Subversion in 1930s Detective Fiction and Thrillers Agatha Christie: Marple, Poirot and ‘playing the game’ The jobbing writer The firebrand The rival queen The eccentric The pseudonymous poet And then there was one The thriller Notes Works cited Timeline of Works Timeline of National Events Timeline of International Events Biographies of Writers Index