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 studie
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
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
This volume undertakes a fundamental reassessment of utopianism during the modernist period. It charts the rich spectrum of literary utopian projects between 1885 and 1945, and reconstructs their cult