The 1920s - (Decades) by Tamás Bényei & Shene Boskani & Philip Tew & Nick Hubble & Leigh Wilson (Hardcover)

About the Book

A wide-ranging critical re-evaluation of British fiction of the 1920s, this book examines writers from Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster to A. A. Milne and Naomi Mitchison.

Book Synopsis

The particularity of 1920s British fiction has become obscured by an academic focus on modernism. This book takes a fresh approach to the decade by examining both canonical writers such as Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster as well as less widely-studied writers such as A. A. Milne and Naomi Mitchison.

From the aftermath of First World War to the Great Depression of 1929, and its political consequences, the 1920s were a decade marked by radical social change. Internationally, there was an ongoing shift of global power and nationally, Britain was adjusting to the aftermath of First World War, to no longer being the dominant imperial power in the world, and to the introduction of universal male suffrage and votes for women over thirty, which was extended to those over twenty-one in 1928. This volume relates the British fiction of the decade to these contexts in order to reassess and explain trends of the period, such as war books, fantastic romance, literary modernism, and new expressions of gender and sexuality.

A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, the book covers such writers as Agatha Christie, E. M. Forster, Ethel Mannin, Somerset Maugham, R. H. Mottram, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, A. A. Milne, Hope Mirrlees, Naomi Mitchison, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, among others; illustrating how their key themes and concerns fit within the social and political circumstances of the decade.

Review Quotes

"This volume undertakes a salutary unravelling and re-weaving of literary history. Returning to the beginning of a turbulent century of social and literary change, the editors and contributors incisively trace a host of fictional modalities that supplement and blur the narrative of modernism, revealing the decade of the 1920s as a complex braid, excitingly rife with experiments both gendered and generic." --Debra Rae Cohen, Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, University of South Carolina, USA

About the Author

Nick Hubble is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English at Brunel University London, UK.
Shene Boskani has recently completed her PhD at Brunel University London. UK.
Tamás Bényei is Professor of English Literature at the Department of British Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary.