British Fiction in the 1930s

British Fiction in the 1930s studies the literary climate of the British 1930s through a critical treatment of some of its influential and socially representative fiction. The works depict, in various ways, a culture under the stress of seemingly insoluble economic and intensifying international dilemmas, a culture that seems betrayed by the promise of its past and the paralysis of its present. The fiction considers transforming solutions, individual and sexual rebellions as well as the fears and attractions of social and political change.

Inhalt
Acknowledgments - The Ambiguities of Commitment - PART 1: THE LANGUAGE OF SOCIAL REFERENCE - Richard Aldington's Excoriation of the Past - J.B. Priestley's Indigenous Social Voices - Moments of Intense Social Visualisation: Winifred Holtby, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Patrick Hamilton - PART 2: SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL METAPHOR - Rosamond Lehmann's Social and Historical Landscapes - Houses and Cultural Betrayal in Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction - Henry Green's Particular Visionary Gerunds - Nicholas Blake's 'Stake in the Social System' - L.P. Hartley and the Reverberations of Absence - Essays, Chronicles and Fiction: Alternatives to Despair - Index