Search Results

British Women’s Writing 1930-1960: Between the Waves offers new insights into writing by women in the middle third of the twentieth century. The neologism ‘interfeminism’ facilitates the reassessment of fictional and non-fictional writing previously overshadowed by the cultural and social monoliths of modernism, postmodernism and first and second wave feminism. Often critically overlooked or out of print, these writers reveal a literary-historical and contemporary feminist significance that has only recently been recognised. While it is assumed that the authors discussed here largely identified and were recognised as women, many were engaged in actively challenging or consciously constructing the social norms that facilitated this recognition through their depiction of the domestic and public space. Close readings underpinned by a range of theoretical concepts and archival research map uncharted cultural space and reveal the dynamism and innovation of a period of assumed literary and political quiescence.

This chapter considers what the early twentieth-century writers told the children the war had done to them, and looks at the interest of the children in the USA after the war, which was something the parents wanted to avoid. It considers the status of British and European writing after the war, as well as the emergence of Germanophobia and Naziphobia. The chapter identifies a distrust of Europe that grew along with a new English chauvinism, and the classic wartime crisis which occurs when the child realises that the official Authority is in fact false and destructive of what the child knows it stands for. It also discusses in detail the strip cartoon ‘Tintin’.

This chapter discusses the protection program of the Spanish empire, which effectively replaced the previous annexation plans of Britain. It notes that during the Peninsular War, British writing about Spanish America seemed to turn away from previous works that had expressed sympathy for the Spanish American natives with British imperialism. It then studies several works that concealed Britain's unabated interest in starting commercial dominance in Spanish America. The chapter also considers the question of how to present Britain's emancipation efforts as consistent with their promise to protect the Spanish empire.

This introductory chapter discusses the study presented in this book, which examines the relationship formed between British writing and Asian people and places during the colonial period. The parameters of the writings that are examined are that they are an Eastern object of representation and a Western modality or point of view. The following chapters are inter-related and represent an incomplete methodological project.

This book reads between the frames of 1930s literature and cinema, exploring the politics of the engagement (or entanglement) of the two media. The 1930s and 1940s saw the birth and death of a tradition of politically committed filmic British writing which overtly aligned the socialist and the cinematic. It also brings together a wide cross-section of the 1930s Left, allowing Walter Allen, W.H. Auden, and Virginia Woolf to brush shoulders, politically and aesthetically. Moreover, it tries to restore the excitement and hope to the ‘morbid’ inter-war decade. Finally, the chapters included in this book are given.

This chapter explores British popular writing. It considers some of the means by which stereotypes of Indians that emanated from the United States circulated within Britain and were modified and filtered through domestic concerns. The chapter first assesses the influence that James Fenimore Cooper had on transatlantic adventure and historical fiction, and then pass to Charles Dickens's often contradictory treatments of native peoples, before looking at the more complicated case of Mayne Reid. This British writer of popular Westerns employed contemporary American-generated stereotypes of Indians and at times reinforced that country's message of manifest destiny, yet he also managed to question certain political and racial aspects of American life in a way that offered up a warning to his home readership. These stereotypes are read through a consideration of the shifting nuances of the idea of the “savage” in mid-Victorian Britain.

This chapter states that British historical writing has no shape, that there exists no pattern beyond the randomness of spontaneous authorship and occasional moments of involuntary intertextuality. A principal tool in approaching British historiography should be a rejection of the historiographical exercise as simply descriptive bibliography, a corresponding move in the direction of an explanatory account of when, how, and why images of the British past underwent transformation at the hands of its historians. This chapter also talks about the diverging pattern of expectation within British historiography in the 19th century which it states hangs on a contested understanding of what place history should play in framing its audiences' understanding of a nation and state.

The introduction rethinks three long-standing narratives about the nature of British historical writing from 1770 to 1845. The first narrative concerns the widely held belief that the relationship between history and literature was open and porous, resulting in a period of epistemological innocence marred only by encroaching disciplinary transformations and the increasing professionalization of history. The second narrative relates to the exclusion of literary texts from accounts of the ‘rise of historicism’ and the birth of the modern historical method, despite obvious parallels between the rise of the historical novel and that of a new historical consciousness. The third narrative concerns the characterization of ‘Romantic’ history as a subjective and emotionally charged reaction to philosophic history and other Enlightenment modes of representing the past, thereby eliding a far more varied and complex set of Romantic historiographical agendas and representative practices based on newly expanded definitions of Romanticism and its periodicity.

This chapter examines how the postcolonial diasporas migrating to Britain after 1945 determined the policies, practices and priorities of the state. In the 1980s, national arts policy was shaped by two main political realities: the sharp retreat from welfare state era social entitlement on the one hand, and the emergence of ‘black’ as a shared category of resistance on the other. The two converged in the Arts Council document The Glory of the Garden (1984) which heralded a new era of multicultural recognition even as it attacked the very idea of a state funded literary culture. The chapter discusses the unexpected consequences and fears of balkanization it unleashed in the literary world, as multiculturalism came to be cast as an enemy of autonomy, focusing on the landmark legal case the Commission for Racial Equality brought against the Arts Council for racial discrimination.

This chapter examines historical writing in Britain. It suggests three phases for the principal developments of the period from 1400 about 1740. The first phase, from 1400 to about 1550, is dominated by dynastic and nationalist themes inherited from the royal/baronial and monarchical/papal struggles of the Later Middle Ages. A ‘Late Renaissance and Reformation’ phase, c.1540–1660, is governed by the religious tensions that climaxed in rebellion in both kingdoms. In the third phase, a ‘Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century’ phase, ending about 1740, historical writing adjusted itself to the permanent presence of ideological division; to the reality of a multi-denominational kingdom in England and of a Scotland increasingly dependent upon its wealthier southern neighbour; and to the tastes of a broader and more demanding readership.

This chapter studies British historical writing, tracing its transformations from the end of the war—when, arguably, much of the late nineteenth-century empiricist agenda was still intact, and political history continued to dominate—through signal events such as the founding of a new journal of radical historiography called Past and Present (1952), to the advent of neoconservatism in the 1980s, the puffing up and eventual bursting of the bubble of Franco-American-style quantification, and the advent of the cultural turn. Intertwined in the narratives of structural evolution, as well as generational narratives, one might see another in the growing presence of technology as a force impelling historical method and providing new ways of disseminating research. By 1995, many of Britain’s most successful historians defined themselves as ‘public intellectuals’ or tele-dons commanding a wide audience in ways that no one could have dreamed of in 1945.

This chapter turns from reading the accidental and uncertain nature of British post-war avant-gardism as constitutive of its status as late, to asking the question, late to whom? Lateness clearly implies a particular relation to history, and assumes an emergence from a particular tradition, in this instance Western and modernist. What does it mean to conceive of this form of writing—the accidental, the experimental, the uncertain—in the period as new, that is, in terms of the anglophone modernist tradition? The particular historical trajectories of Britain’s colonial past, and the dissolution of its empire, combined to mean that in the 1950s and 1960s some of the most innovative writers were migrants. This chapter accordingly asks how this argument thus far might be extended by thinking about how the specifically postcolonial historical moment is illuminated by their (partial, or perceived) refusal of realism, taking as its examples the experimentalists Zulfikar Ghose and Denis Williams.

This chapter explores the Anglo-Indian novel. The history of British writing on India stretches back almost as far as the Indo-British imperial encounter and includes travel writing, missionary letters, military memoirs, and scholarly accounts of Indian history and culture, all of which were published in great numbers in the eighteenth century. Literary texts followed, and included short prose narratives depicting Anglo-Indian life, missionary tales, descriptions of the landscape, and stories of native life. While all these forms were well received in their day, none was to prove as popular as the novel, which during the nineteenth century became the dominant form of Anglo-Indian literature. In the early nineteenth century, India was also used as an exotic setting for early fictions by a number of writers who would go on to rank amongst the best-known novelists of the Victorian period.