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.

Table of Contents:
Contributors Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: The 1930s in the Twenty-First Century Nick Hubble, Burnel University, UK, Luke Seaber, University College London, UK and Elinor Taylor, University of Westminster, UK 1. ‘You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe’: Beyond the Myth of the ‘Thirties’ Nick Hubble 2. Spectres of English Fascism: History, Aesthetics and Cultural Critique Elinor Taylor 3 Naomi Mitchison and the Class and Gender Politics of Eugenics Natasha Periyan, University of Kent, UK 4. British Culture and Identity in 1930s Anglophone Literature from Australia, Canada and India Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay, University of Regina, Canada 5. Timely Interventions and Disruptive Temporalities: Queer Writing of the 1930s Glyn Salton-Cox, University of California Santa Barabara, USA 6. Private Faces in Public Places: Auto-Intertextuality, Authority and 1930s Fiction Luke Seaber 7. ‘How To Acquire Culture’ by The Man Who Sees: The Middlebrow, Liberal Humanism, and Morally Superior Lower-Middle-Class Citizenship in Woman’s Weekly, 1938-1939 Ellie Reed, University of Roehampton, UK 8. ‘It’s a narsty biziness’: Conservatism and Subversion in 1930s Detective Fiction and Thrillers Glyn White, University of Salford, UK Timeline of Works Timeline of National Events Timeline of International Events Biographies of Writers Index