English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, HistoryThis study approaches the fiction of the 1930s through critical debates about genre, language and history, setting these in their original context, and discussing the generic forms most favoured by novelists at the time. Chris Hopkins uses a series of case studies of texts to draw on, develop or explore the boundaries, contemporary usefulness and complexities of particular prose genres. Generic debates and the political-aesthetic effects of different kinds of representation were live issues as discursive struggles and negotiations took place between modernist and realist modes, between high, middle and lowbrow categorisations of culture, between literature and mass culture, and between different conceptions of the role of the writer, politics and nationality, sexuality and gender identities. |
Contents
Novel Politics Language Genre and History in English Fiction of the 1930s | 1 |
Modernism and Modernity | 9 |
Documentary and Proletarian Pastoral | 41 |
History and the Historical Novel | 75 |
Thrillers and Dystopias | 121 |
Notes | 158 |
169 | |
174 | |