Literature from the 'political' 1930s has often been read in contrast to the 'aesthetic' 1920s. This collection suggests a different approach. Drawing on recent work expanding our sense of the political and aesthetic energies of interwar modernisms, these chapters track transitions in British literature. The strains of national break-up, class dissension and political instability provoked a new literary order, and reading across the two decades between the wars exposes the continuing pressure of these transitions. Instead of following familiar markers - 1922, the Crash, the Spanish Civil War - or isolating particular themes from literary study, this collection takes key problems and dilemmas from literature 'in transition' and reads them across familiar and unfamiliar cultural works and productions, in their rich and contradictory context of publication. Themes such as gender, sexuality, nation and class are thus present throughout these essays. Major writers such as Woolf are read alongside forgotten and marginalised voices.

Examines debates central to postwar British culture, showing the pressures of reconstruction and the mutual implication of war and peace.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Britain's imperial power and influence was at its height. These were years of daring, when adventurers sounded the mysteries of the deep sea and the distant poles, aviators sped through the skies, and new media technologies transformed communication. They were years of social upheaval, during which long-suppressed voices – particularly those of women, of the labouring classes, and of colonial subjects – grew louder and demanded to be heard. They were years of violence, of insurrection and political agitation, and of imperial conflicts that would encompass continents. By subjecting specific developments in literature and related culture to a fine-grained and historically-informed analysis, British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age? explores the writing of this extraordinary period in all its complexity and vibrancy.

This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends from 1980-2000.

This volume traces transitions in British literature from 1960 to 1980, illuminating a diverse range of authors, texts, genres and movements. It considers innovations in form, emergent identities, changes in attitudes, preoccupations and in the mind itself, local and regional developments, and shifts within the oeuvres of individual authors.

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.

This book offers the first sustained analysis of the interactions between British writers, propaganda and culture from the Second World War to the Cold War. It traces the involvement of a series of major cultural figures in domestic and international propaganda campaigns and throws new light on the global deployment of British propaganda and cultural diplomacy in colonial and post-colonial theatres such as Cyprus, India and Sierra Leone. Chapters re-evaluate the propaganda work of prominent writers including Arthur Koestler and Dylan Thomas in the light of new archival research, study how organisations including the BBC, British Council and Ministry of Information engaged with new media forms, analyse cultural representations of propaganda service and investigate how British literature and culture was deployed and projected as a form of soft power across the globe. Featuring contributions from a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, visual culture, book history and radio history, this book brings together a constellation of established and emerging scholars to show the crucial role played in shaping and mediating the techniques and content of British information campaigns of the mid-twentieth century.