Literature of the 1930s: Border Country

The writing of the 1930s is the record of a time dominated by a sense of being caught between different times and places; between two world wars between generations, between modernism and realism, between middle class and working class, between local and national cultures and between national and international politics. British Literature showed more overt engagement with radical politics than ever before or since while also testing the uses and limits of difficulty, encryption and the legacy of modernism. Too often thought of as a period defined by the preoccupations of a handful of prestigious writers, the decade of the 1930s is here re-read in ways that relate these preoccupations to popular cultural emphases as well as to international debates, attending to middlebrow tastes as well as to avant- garde experimentation, and recognizing the significance of regional emphases and issues of gender.