About this Book

"On first glance, British literature of the 1930s offers a natural subject for a dedicated Cambridge Companion. As critics have often remarked, few other decades seem to claim such a compelling status as a self-contained literary-historical era, with a series of political events, aesthetic debates, and emerging literary networks providing an identity that goes beyond the normal convenience of decade-based periodisation. With just a slight nudging of the boundaries, the 1930s is often characterised as running from 1929 until 1939, bracketed on one side by the stock market crash of 1929 and on the other side by the outbreak of the Second World War, with September 1939 marking an end to the epoch as the world entered a cataclysmic new phase. Between these acute flashpoints came a climate of social and ideological tensions. Capitalism and the old order were, for many, at the point of collapse, making sections of the intelligentsia restless for alternatives. Events such as the rise of Nazism and fascism, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the instigation of the Popular Front of anti-fascist activism added urgency to these debates"--