This History offers a new and comprehensive picture of 1930s British literature. The '30s have often been cast as a literary-historical anomaly, either as a 'low, dishonest decade', a doomed experiment in combining art and politics, or as a 'late modernist' afterthought to the intense period of artistic experimentation in the 1920s. By contrast, the contributors to this volume explore the contours of a 'long 1930s' by repositioning the decade and its characteristic concerns at the heart of twentieth-century literary history. This book expands the range of writers covered, moving beyond a narrow focus on towering canonical figures to draw in a more diverse cast of characters, in terms of race, gender, class, and forms of artistic expression. The book's four sections emphasize the decade's characteristic geographical and sexual identities; the new media landscapes and institutional settings its writers operated in; questions of commitment and autonomy; and British writing's international entanglements.

Offers a radically new picture of the 'long 1930s', describing it as a pivot of twentieth-century literary and cultural production.

About the Author
Benjamin Kohlmann teaches English literature at the University of Freiburg. He is the author of Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (2014) and Speculative States: Literature and Reform in Britain, 1870-1920 (forthcoming). His articles have been published in PMLA, ELH, Novel, and other journals. He has co-edited several essay collections and special issues, including new work on literature and anti-communism (with Matthew Taunton), modernist utopianism, and the communist writer Edward Upward. Matthew Taunton is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture (forthcoming) and Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (2009). He has also written various articles and book chapters on modern literature and politics, and on cities. With Benjamin Kohlmann, he co-edited a 2015 special issue of Literature & History on the subject of literary anti-Communism. He is deputy editor of Critical Quarterly.

Reviews
'... a vast compendium edited by Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, full of penetrating insights into a decade one had previously thought over-explored.' D. J. Taylor, The Times Literary Supplement
' ...essay after essay shows careful study, archival attention, and a strong editorial hand ... the editors have done a fine job of presenting an interesting array of research which certainly does some fine direction pointing for future research.' Matthew Chambers, The Modernist Review
'The range, intelligence, originality and scholarship of its essays make this a valuable collection.' Alistair Davies, Textual Practice
'The volume supports and extends scholarship that recognizes the decade's connections to as well as departures from modernism, and that seeks to more closely understand the distinctive forms and practices, and broadening networks of writers and professionals in the cultural sphere, that emerged during the thirties ... This volume showcases the breadth, diversity and vitality of 1930s cultural texts and producers (stretching the purely literary to other media including music, film, and radio), and offers an invaluable resource for students and scholars.' Naomi Milthorpe, The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945
'Kohlmann and Taunton have assembled a thrilling collection of essays that provide diverse and distinct entry points into the long, wide, and urgent 1930s.' Michael McCluskey, Modernism/Modernity



Book Information
ISBN 9781108474535
Author Benjamin Kohlmann
Format Hardback
Page Count 474
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 810g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 158mm * 30mm