Rewriting the Thirties

Rewriting the Thirties
Author: Keith Williams
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-09-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317886402

Rewriting the Thirties questions the myth of the 'anti-modernist' decade. Conversely, the editors argue it is a symptomatic, transitional phase between modern and post-modern writing and politics, at a time of cultural and technological change. The text reconsiders some of the leading writers of the period in the light of recent theoretical developments, through essays on the ambivalent assimilation of Modernist influences, among proletarian and canonical novelists including James Barke and George Orwell, and among poets including Auden, MacNeice, Swingler and Bunting, and in the work of feminist writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. In this substantial remapping, the complexity and scope of literary-critical debate at the time is discussed in relation to theatrical innovation, audience attitudes to the mass medium of modernity - cinema - the poetics of suburbia, consumerism and national ideology, as well as the discursive strategies of British and American documentarism.

And in Our Time

And in Our Time
Author: Antony Shuttleworth
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838755181

This book brings together essays which, in diverse ways, not only revise exisitng views on thirties writing, but also provide ways of accounting for its critical neglect. The essays examine, f0orm a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives, a body of work that reflects the true diversity of the literary and cultural contexts of the thirties, and includes studies on the work of Louis MacNeice, Frank Sheed, Christopher Dawson, Alick West, Christopher Caudwell, Stevie Smith, Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bottome, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, George Orwell, Christina Stead, Randall Swingler, and Ralph Fox.

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.

Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era

Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era
Author: Ann Catherine Hoag
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2024-07-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040095828

Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era engages feminist, temporal, and narrative theories to offer fresh examinations of interwar-era accounts by women about travel and movement and considers the use and limitations of time as a subversive force in their texts. This book makes a significant contribution to the under-examined study of women’s travel writing between the wars and synthesises and applies a variety of feminist, narrative, and postcolonial theories to excavate new understandings of the intersection between women, travel, and time in writing. The book studies the emergence of the aviatrix after the Great War and moves through to the representations of war in women’s travel on the brink of World War II. Each chapter offers a unique theoretical framework and examines how experiences of time impact perceptions of women’s bodies and identities, their engagement with history and discourse, and the problematic influence on colonialism. Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era is essential reading to any student or researcher in the field of women’s travel writing, as well as scholars of gender studies, war and interwar history, and cultural heritage.

Virginia Woolf's Late Cultural Criticism

Virginia Woolf's Late Cultural Criticism
Author: Alice Wood
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 144110741X

After the Modernist literary experiments of her earlier work, Virginia Woolf became increasingly concerned with overt social and political commentary in her later writings, which are preoccupied with dissecting the links between patriarchy, patriotism, imperialism and war. This book unravels the complex textual histories of The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941) to expose the genesis and evolution of Virginia Woolf's late cultural criticism. Fusing a feminist-historicist approach with the practices and principles of genetic criticism, this innovative study scrutinizes a range of holograph, typescript and proof documents within their historical context to uncover the writing and thinking processes that produced Woolf's cultural analysis during 1931-1941. By demonstrating that Woolf's late cultural criticism developed through her literary experimentalism as well as in response to contemporary social, political and economic upheavals, this book offers a fresh perspective on her emergence as a cultural commentator in her final decade and paves the way for further genetic enquiries in the field.

Committed Styles

Committed Styles
Author: Benjamin Kohlmann
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2014-08-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191024635

Committed Styles offers a new understanding of the politicized literature of the 1930s and its relationship to modernism. It reclaims a central body of literary and critical works for modernist studies, offering in-depth readings of texts by T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards, as well as by key left-wing authors including William Empson, David Gascoyne, Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings, and Edward Upward. Building on substantial new archival research, Benjamin Kohlmann explores the deep tensions between modernist experimentation and political vision that lie at the heart of these works. Taking as its focus the work of these writers, the book argues that the close interactions between literary production, critical reflection, and political activism in the decade shaped the influential view of modernism as fundamentally apolitical. Intervening in debates about the long life of modernism, it contends that we need to take seriously the anti-modernist impulse of 1930s left-wing literature even when attention is paid to the formal complexity of these 'committed' works. The tonal ambiguities which run through the politicised literature of the 1930s thus effect not a disengagement from but a more thorough immersion in the profoundly conflicted political commitments of the decade. At the same time, the study shows that debates about the politics of writing in the 1930s continue to inform current debates about the relationship between literature and political commitment.

Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain

Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain
Author: Benjamin Kohlmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317145658

Offering the first book-length consideration of Edward Upward (1903-2009), one of the major British left-wing writers, this collection positions his life and works in the changing artistic, social and political contexts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Upward’s fiction and non-fiction, from the 1920s onwards, illustrate the thematic and formal richness of left-wing writing during the twentieth-century age of extremes. At the same time, Upward’s work shows the inherent tensions of a life committed at once to writing and to politics. The full range of Upward’s work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined, including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s, his Marxist fiction of the 1930s, the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy The Spiral Ascent and his formally and thematically innovative later stories. The essays collected here reevaluate Upward’s central place in twentieth-century British literary culture and assess his legacy for the twenty-first century.

Modernism from the Margins

Modernism from the Margins
Author: Chris Wigginton
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786837250

“Modernism from the Margins” is an accessible and challenging account of the 1930s writing of two of the most popular authors of the time. Locating the work of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas historically, the book questions standard accounts of the period as Auden-dominated and offers an inclusive and theoretical account of the engagement of both writers with the varieties of Modernism. It is the first reading at length of either MacNeice’s or Thomas’s work in the light of literary theory, and one of only a handful of texts to look at the writing of the 1930s in these terms.This book is an important contribution to contemporary discussions of both of these writers, and of the general issues of modernism, postmodernism, literary identity, and cultural identity it raises.

The Swarming Streets

The Swarming Streets
Author: Lawrence Phillips
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789042016637

Preliminary Material --Introduction: The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London /Lawrence Phillips --A Risky Business: Going Out in the Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson /Nadine Attewell --"A Filmless London": Flânerie and Urban Culture in Dorothy Richardson's Articles for Close Up --Virgina Woolf's London and the Archaeology of Character /Vicki Tromanhauser --Treasure Seekers in the City: London in the Novels of E. Nesbit /Jenny Bavidge --"Thou art full of Stirs, a Tumultuous City": Storm Jameson and London in the 1920s /Chiara Briganti --"A Network of Inscrutable Canyons": Wartime London's Sensory Landscapes /Sara Wasson --Tales from the Crypt: Wartime London in Graham Swift's Shuttlecock /Ingrid Gunby --My Doingthings: London According to B. S. Johnson /Philip Tew --Cheerleading and Charting the Cosmopolis: London as Linear Narrative and Contested Space /Rob Burton --Shades of the Eighties: The Colour of Memory /Joe Brooker --Julian Barnes and the Marginalisation of Metropolitanism: The Suburban Centre in Metroland and Letters from London /Keith Wilson --"This Patron of the Spurned, this Perambulator of Margins, this Witness": Iain Sinclair as Rag-picker /Samantha Skinner --Images of London in African Literature: Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy and Dambudzo Marechera's The Black Insider /Kwadwo Jnr Osei-Nyame --Andrea Levy's London Novels /Susan Alice Fischer --Notes on Contributors /Lawrence Phillips --Index /Lawrence Phillips.

Liberating Dylan Thomas

Liberating Dylan Thomas
Author: Rhian Barfoot
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2015-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1783161868

The book attempts, for the first time, to demonstrate a vital connection between Thomas’s poetry and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This will benefit readers by helping shed new and illuminating light on the writing and will help close the gap that sadly still exists between Thomas’s critical and popular receptions. Close textual analysis of poems that have to date received only scant critical attention e.g. ‘Today this insect’ The Notebooks have received only scant critical attention, and have been subordinated to a purely minor role. Here, however the Notebooks are re-visited and re-evaluated, because the text of these four manuscript exercise books, provides us with a highly significant and revealing document.