A History of 1930s British Literature
- Submitting institution
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The University of East Anglia
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 182634697
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 978-1108474535
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- The first large-scale reassessment of 1930s British Literature since Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties (1988), this collaborative work responds to fundamental shifts in the field to set out an original argument that links its 26 chapters, producing a fresh account of the decade’s literature.
The organising concept of the book is the ‘long 1930s’—an experiment in re-periodization intended to defamiliarize conventional periodizing categories. Even those (like Cunningham) who celebrate the literature of the 1930s sometimes see it as a literary-historical anomaly. The thirties, packaged as the ‘Red Decade’, became a cautionary tale about the dangers of mixing literature and politics. Recent developments in modernist studies have, meanwhile, extended the modernist period—and the modernist paradigm of autonomous literary art—into the 1930s (and beyond). Our framing of a long 1930s counteracts these tendencies, generating new insights by making the politicised art of the decade a central fulcrum of twentieth-century literary history, with resonance in Edwardian writing and in a postwar literature engaged with decolonisation and the building of the welfare state. Our book benefits from the work of feminist and postcolonial scholars, bringing postcolonial intellectuals (like C.L.R. James and Mulk Raj Anand) and women writers (like Winifred Holtby and Sylvia Townsend Warner) to the fore.
Editorial duties were shared evenly. We both read and commented on everything, but I took primary responsibility for sections 2 (‘Media Histories and the Institutions of Literature’) and 4 (‘The Global 1930s: Conflict and Change), communicating with the contributors and helping to shape the arguments of those sections. Kohlmann took sections 1 and 3. We co-wrote the introduction. My chapter (‘Literature and Education in the Long 1930s’) makes an original contribution to debates about left-wing writers’ involvement in education, drawing on new archival research.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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