New Book

Futility and Anarchy? British Literature in Transition 1920-1940

24th Dec 2018

There are chapters on Suffrage literature, Lewis Jones and the Popular Front, Glasgow and the ‘cancer of Empire’, and many other topics of literary-political interest to Marxists. One of our contributors, Snehal Shingavi, writes regularly for International Socialist Review.

Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill, eds., Futility and Anarchy? British Literature in Transition 1920-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Table of contents:

Introduction Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill
Part I. After the War:
1. Out of Mrs Colefax’s Drawing-Room: poets and poetry between the wars Harry Ricketts
2. Perverting the postwar: sexuality and state violence in women’s literature Layne Parish Craig
3. Journeys without maps: literature and spiritual experience Lara Vetter
Part II. Literature after Human Nature Changed:
4. Writing the vote: suffrage, gender, and politics Sowon S. Park and Kathryn Laing
5. Literature and human rights Rachel Potter
6. Psychoanalysis and modernism John Farrell
Part III. Immense Panoramas of Futility and Anarchy: Writing and Politics:
7. History: the past in transition Gabrielle McIntire
8. Women’s work? Domestic labour and proletarian fiction Charles Ferrall
9. Ordinary places, intermodern genres: documentary, travel, and literature Kristin Bluemel
10. Bloomsbury conversations that didn’t happen: Indian writing between British modernism and anti-colonialism Snehal Shingavi and Charlotte Nunes
Part IV. The First Break-Up of Britain:
11. Between Holyhead and Kingstown: Anglo-Irish perspectives on the character of British fiction Michael G. Cronin
12. Cancer of empire: the Glasgow novel between the wars Liam McIlvanney
13. Lewis Jones and the making of Welsh Identity Shintaro Kono
14. From Optik to Haptik: Celticism, symbols and stones in the 1930s Peter Mackay
Part V. Transitions High and Low:
15. On the home front: designs for living in British drama between the wars Penny Farfan
16. Middlemen, middlebrow, broadbrow Nicola Wilson
17. Detective fiction: resolutions without solutions J. C. Bernthal
18. British literature in transmission: writing and wireless James Purdon.

https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/british-literature-transition-19201940-futility-and-anarchy?format=HB