Abstract
This book has arisen, in the first instance, from a felt need to draw a circle round a small number of texts which, according to received formulations, might not be susceptible to juxtaposition. It has seemed to me that the extraordinary similarities displayed by these texts — Howards End, Heartbreak House, Women in Love and The Waste Land — demand that they be read in conjunction as parallel articulations of a specific moment in history. This book seeks to establish a critical language which may recognise and express their affinities with each other; in so doing, it propounds a fresh configuration, and perhaps an alternative perspective. In an admittedly restricted focus, it reproblematises literature as it has been constructed in critical accounts of the period.
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Notes
It is also the period which marks, in the title of a work by Robert H. Ross, The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal 1910–22 (1967). Ross distinguishes between ‘revolt’ and ‘revival’, with the First World War as the point of demarcation. His account provides a valuable amplification of literary production in the period, alongside the growth of modernism.
See, for example, in relation to Heartbreak House S. Weintraub, Bernard Shaw 1914–1918: Journey to Heartbreak (1973);
in relation to Women in Love P. Delaney, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War (Hassocks, Sussex, 1979)
and Scott Sanders, D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels (1973);
and, for The Waste Land S. Spender, Eliot (1975)
and P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975).
For a full treatment of this theme see M. Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern English Literature (Oxford, 1971 );
R. Gill, Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination (1972);
and R. Williams, The Country and the City (1973).
G. Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (1956) p. 12.
See T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976) p. 89.
H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) p. 206. Subsequent page-references are inserted in the text.
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© 1984 Anne Wright
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Wright, A. (1984). Towards a Literature of Crisis. In: Literature of Crisis, 1910–22. Macmillan Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17449-2_1
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