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Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins: v. 3 (Edinburgh History of Twentieth-century Literature in Britain): Volume 3 Annotated Edition
Author(s): Chris Baldick (Author)
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication Date: 3 Oct. 2012
- Edition: Annotated
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 0748627308
- ISBN-13: 9780748627301
Book Description
This book surveys a war-haunted, self-consciously disoriented but exceptionally vibrant decade of writing. The 1920s emerge in this study as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist, non-Modernist and semi-Modernist writers met on shared ground with common memories and preoccupations. Spanning genres high and low, including war memoirs, critical essays and detective stories as well as drama, poetry and the novel, Chris Baldick’s approachable study of the decade sets out a ‘map’ of the new post-Great-War literary landscape with its unique configuration of genres, settings and character-types. Successive chapters investigate the place of ideas (biological, Freudian, esoteric, and more) in literature; the uses of anachronism and the time-sense of the Twenties; re-shapings of war-memory and war myth into varieties of Twenties ‘disillusionment’; and curious connections between crime-writing and comedy in the period. This account moves easily between experimental and more ‘traditional’ literary tendencies of the decade to discover common obsessions and shared moods of elegiac despair, nervous frivolity and bold irreverence. This is the first general account of Twenties literature in Britain. It provides readings of leading authors of the time including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Noe I Coward, Bernard Shaw, Dorothy L. Sayers, W. Somerset Maugham and Robert Graves as well as less well-remembered contemporaries. It is attentive to multiple genres and contexts.
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain General Editor: Randall Stevenson How did literature develop in Britain in the twentieth century? How did it interact with the wider culture and history of the times? Each of the volumes in this series analyses the literary developments of a single decade in their widest contexts. Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins Chris Baldick The first general account of this exceptionally vibrant decade of writing in Britain. Eclipsed until now by the dominant story of Modernism, a much more inclusive range of 1920s literature emerges freshly illuminated in Chris Baldick’s approachable history. The Twenties are reclaimed here as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist and non-Modernist currents are shown to engage with common memories and preoccupations. Spanning many genres high and low, including war memoirs, critical essays and detective stories as well as drama, poetry and the novel, Baldick’s account situates leading works and authors of the decade – Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence, Huxley, Coward and others – among a rich array of their lesser-known contemporaries to discover common obsessions – especially with the now ‘lost’ world of pre-War Britain – and shared moods of elegiac despair, nervous frivolity and bold irreverence. Chris Baldick is Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written several works of literary history including /The Modern Movement/ (Oxford, 2004), along with the /Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms/ (2008), and co-edited with Jane Desmarais, /Decadence: An Annotated Anthology/ (Manchester, 2012).
About the Author
Chris Baldick is Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London.
