The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940

The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940
Author: Elinor Taylor
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004356355

In The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940, Elinor Taylor provides the first study of the relationship between the British novel and the anti-fascist Popular Front strategy endorsed by the Comintern in 1935. Through readings of novels by British Communists including Jack Lindsay, John Sommerfield, Lewis Jones and James Barke, Taylor shows that the realist novel of the left was a key site in which the politics of anti-fascist alliance were rehearsed. Maintaining a dialogue with theories of populism and with Georg Lukács’s vision of a revived literary realism ensuing from the Popular Front, this book at once illuminates the cultural formation of the Popular Front in Britain and proposes a new framework for reading British fiction of this period.

The Politics of 1930s British Literature

The Politics of 1930s British Literature
Author: Natasha Periyan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350019852

Winner of the 2018 International Standing Conference for the History of Education's First Book Award Drawing on a rich array of archival sources and historical detail, The Politics of 1930s British Literature tells the story of a school-minded decade and illuminates new readings of the politics and aesthetics of 1930s literature. In a period of shifting political claims, educational policy shaped writers' social and gender ideals. This book explores how a wide array of writers including Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Winifred Holtby and Graham Greene were informed by their pedagogic work. It considers the ways in which education influenced writers' analysis of literary style and their conception of future literary forms. The Politics of 1930s British Literature argues that to those perennial symbols of the 1930s, the loudspeaker and the gramophone, should be added the textbook and the blackboard.

The Popular Front in France

The Popular Front in France
Author: Julian Jackson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1990-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521312523

This is the first full-length study in English of the Popular Front, the left-wing coalition which emerged in France during the 1930s in response to the threat of fascism and which went on to win the elections of 1936, giving France her first socialist premier, Léon Blum. After a brief narrative history of the Popular Front the book is organised thematically around the main historiographical debates to which the Popular Front has given rise. Among the issues considered are the origins of the strikes of 1936, the reasons for the failure of the Popular Front economic policy, the relationship between culture and politics in France in the 1930s and the causes of France's policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The book views the Popular Front at three levels - as a mass movement, political coalition and government - and argues that it must not be seen just as a narrowly political phenomenon but as a political, social and cultural explosion which attempted to break down the barriers between all areas of human activity in the highly compartmentalised society of France in the 1930s. Even if the Popular Front ultimately failed in this aim it has acquired legendary status in France, and the epilogue to the book briefly examines the 'myth' of the Popular Front from 1936 to the present day.

The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction
Author: Nick Hubble
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350079162

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.

Mid-Century Romance

Mid-Century Romance
Author: John T. Connor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192675885

Mid-Century Romance chronicles a revival of the historical novel in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the cultures of British modernism and international communism. Born of a national turn in world politics, these novels met the turbulence of mid-century history with narratives of national becoming, roadmaps to situate their readers in the pattern of social change. Their writers were often mindful of the genre's romantic-era heritage: they saw themselves as following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and they drew on the same rescued remains of primitive poetry and popular antiquities that romanticism first used to construct its versions of national identity, culture, and tradition. This book shows how the impulse to salvage traces of ancestral culture and press them to new purpose links the mid-century national-historical novel to the rise of radical social history and magical realism. Post-war anticommunism shaped a tradition of the novel as a preserve of art and the individual. Mid-Century Romance counters with a different genealogy of the British and world novel, whose object is society and the future of community, the nation and its people. It situates its cast of British writers--including the modernists Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf, the communists Jack Lindsay and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the eccentric modernist and sometime fellow traveller John Cowper Powys, and the New Left luminary Raymond Williams--in a transnational perspective that reaches from Bihar, India to Bahia, Brazil.

British Terrorist Novels of the 1970s

British Terrorist Novels of the 1970s
Author: Joseph Darlington
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 331977896X

This book discusses British novels published during the 1970s which feature terrorists either as main characters or a major plot points. The focus on terrorism’s literary depiction provides insight into the politics of the decade. The book analyses texts from Gerald Seymour, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, B.S. Johnson, Tom Sharpe, and Eric Ambler, among others, in order to engage with the IRA, the end of Empire, counterculture and environmentalism. The book provides a brief history of terrorism as a concept and tactic before discussing British literature’s relationship with terrorism. It presents a “standard terrorist morphology” by which to analyse terrorist narratives along with other insights into the British post-war imagination, writing and extremism.

The Birmingham Group

The Birmingham Group
Author: Robin Harriott
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2022-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031143833

The focus of this study is the collective of writers known variously as the Birmingham Group, the Birmingham School or the Birmingham Proletarian Writers who were active in the City of Birmingham in the decade prior to the Second World War. Their narratives chronicle the lived-experience of their fellow citizens in the urban manufacturing centre which had by this time become Britain’s second city. Presumed ‘guilty by association’ with a working-class literature considered overtly propagandistic, formally conservative, or merely the naive emulation of bourgeois realism, their narratives have in consequence suffered undue critical neglect. This book repudiates such assertions by arguing that their works not only contrast markedly with other examples of working-class writing produced in the 1930s but also prove themselves responsive to recent critical assessments seeking a more holistic and intersectional approach to issues of working-class identity.

Social Democratic Criminology

Social Democratic Criminology
Author: Robert Reiner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2020-11-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315296764

This book argues that ‘social democratic criminology’ is an important critical perspective which is essential for the analysis of crime and criminal justice and crucial for humane and effective policy. The end of World War II resulted in 30 years of strategies to create a more peaceful international order. In domestic policy, all Western countries followed agendas informed by a social democratic sensibility. Social Democratic Criminology argues that the social democratic consensus has been pulled apart since the late 1960s, by the hegemony of neoliberalism: a resuscitation of nineteenth-century free market economics. There is now a gathering storm of apocalyptic dangers from climate change, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and other existential threats. This book shows that the neoliberal revolution of the rich pushed aside social democratic values and policies regarding crime and security and replaced them with tougher ‘law and order’ approaches. The initial consequence was a tsunami of crime in all senses. Smarter security techniques did succeed in abating this for a while, but the decade of austerity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis has seen growing violent and serious crime. Social Democratic Criminology charts the history of social democracy, discusses the variety of conflicting ways in which it has been interpreted, and identifies its core uniting concepts and influence on criminology in the twentieth century. It analyses the decline of social democratic criminology and the sustained intellectual and political attacks it has endured. The concluding chapter looks at the prospects for reviving social democratic criminology, itself dependent on the prospects for a rebirth of the broader social democratic movement. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, cultural studies, politics, history, social policy, and all those interested in social democracy and its importance for society.

Fury of Past Time

Fury of Past Time
Author: Daryl Leeworthy
Publisher: Parthian Books
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2023-05-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1914595203

'Leeworthy set out to write a biography which fully reflects the complexity of Thomas' life, especially foregrounding 'the political character of Gwyn's character and creative output' but he does so much more, expanding the reader's knowledge by giving us not just the life but also the times... This punchy portrait of a real Welsh literary heavyweight hits home with the brutal realism of Thomas' jabbing prose and mordant wit.' – Jon Gower, Nation.Cymru 'Fury of Past Time is a model of its kind. An immense amount of research has gone into this biography, which will be the standard work on Gwyn Thomas for many years to come. It deserves to be read by those who already admire the fiction and will be an invaluable introduction for anyone coming to his writing for the first time.' – John Barnie (A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Books Council of Wales) 'Leeworthy knows his subject intimately, sympathises with him entirely, and locates him globally in such a way as to leave the reader with no doubt as to his importance as a writer... Fury of Past Time is destined to be the definitive work on 'the Rhondda Runyon' for many years to come.' – Bethan Jenkins, Wales Arts Review Gwyn Thomas was born, the last of twelve children, into a Rhondda mining family in 1913. After a childhood marked by the strikes of the 1920s, he went off to study Spanish at Oxford University and in Madrid, where he met the poet Federico García Lorca and witnessed the turmoil which would lead to the Spanish Civil War. On his return, amidst the economic mire of the 1930s and his own burgeoning teaching career in Barry in the 1940s, he picked up his pen and began to write. For more than forty years, until his death in 1981, as novelist, screenwriter, master of the short story, and prizewinning playwright, Gwyn Thomas delivered compelling and comedic portraits of his world of South Wales. His creative genius earned enduring fame on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the European Cold War divide. As a provocative and insightful broadcaster, he embraced the possibilities of radio and television, whilst leaving his hosts and guests alike in fits of knowing laughter. This landmark biography, enriched with unrivalled access to private papers and international archives, tells the remarkable story of one of modern Wales's greatest literary voices.

Russomania

Russomania
Author: Rebecca Beasley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 550
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198802129

Russomania is the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the modernist fascination with Russian and early Soviet culture. It traces Russia's transformative effect on literary and intellectual life in Britain between 1881 and 1922, from the assassination of Alexander II to the formation of the Soviet Union. Studying canonical writers alongside a host of less well known authors and translators, it provides an archive-rich study of institutions, disciplines, and networks. Book jacket.