Abstract
Stephen Spender begins his account of the 1930s by declaring it ‘the decade in which young writers became involved in politics’.1 Reflecting his own turbulent political involvement, instead of assuming any harmony or consistency, he describes his generation’s divided heart:
… extremely non-political with half of themselves and extremely political with the other half. With the political half they really did try to see the world from the ideological viewpoint … a struggle between opposed interests, those of capitalist imperialism and those of the socialist revolution. Perhaps one might not in past historical situations have seen this, but in the thirties it was so highlighted by current circumstances … (p. 18).
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Notes
Stephen Spender. The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933–75) (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 13. Andy Croft notes of the thirties: ‘on the whole novelists… were now turning to political subjects, rather than political writers turning to fictional forms,’ Red Letter Days, p. 122.
See George Watson’s ‘The Myth of Catastrophe’ in his Politics and Literature in Modern Britain (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977).
A.J.P. Taylor finds the interwar writers puzzling for their ahistorical lack of regard for enormous gains in social welfare, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 180. Andy Croft argues that novels’ realistic detail prevented ‘the sort of generalized political hectoring’ in poetry, Red Letter Days, pp. 199, 25.
Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties. Also see Cunningham’s essay, ‘Neutral?: 1930s Writers and Taking Sides’, in Class, Culture and Social Change, Frank Gloversmith (ed.) (Sussex: Harvester, 1980), pp. 45–70.
Janet Montefiorés Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (London: Routledge, 1996) studies many British women writers absent from other surveys and makes the significant point that ‘the only political issues in the women’s writing of the 1930s much discussed by feminist literary historians are gender equality and the sexual politics of representation’; this of course ignores ‘the political role’ these writers played in their lives and writing, p. 20.
Patricia Koster, ‘Dystopia: An Eighteenth-Century Appearance’, Notes and Queries 30 (February 1983) pp. 65–6.
For Huxle’s and Orwell’s place in dystopic fictions, see I.F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: 1763–1984 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966)
Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (NY: Harper & Row, 1962).
John Rodden, ‘Reputation, Canon-Formation, Pedagogy: George Orwell in the Classroom’, College English (Sept. 1991) pp. 503–30.
Orwell’s disclaimer is quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), p. 398.
William Lamb, The World Ends (1937), p. 194. Cited in text as World.
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© 1998 Phyllis Lassner
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Lassner, P. (1998). From Fascism in Britain to World War: Dystopic Warnings. In: British Women Writers of World War II. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503786_3
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