Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Chris Baldick (Professor of English, Goldsmiths University of London) ,  Randall Stevenson ,  University of Edinburgh
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
Edition:   Annotated edition
ISBN:  

9780748627318

ISBN 10:   0748627316
Pages:   200
Publication Date:   31 January 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

Preface; General Editor’s Preface; Introduction: In Search of the Twentyish; A Decade Overlooked; Ruinations; Times of the Twenties; Genres of the Twenties; Places of the Twenties; National Literatures and International Authors; Twentyish Figures: Character-Types of the Decade; Antinomies of the Twenties: Tradition and Experiment; Generations of the Twenties; Insecure Boundaries and Textual Revisions; Chapter 1 – A Literature of Ideas; The Inner Voice: Gyres and Ganglia; Heavy Food; Shaw: Back to Methuselah; The Advent of Freud; Sinclair: Life and Death of Harriett Frean; Tendentious Fiction and Narrative Preaching; Longer Philosophical Poems: Bridges and MacDiarmid; Aldous Huxley and the Novel of Ideas; Chapter 2 – Mixing Memory and Desire: Modernism and Anachronism; Woolf: Mrs Dalloway; Ford: Some Do Not . . .; ‘The Waste Land’: Eliot’s Exhumations of the Dead; Yeats and the Artifice of Eternity; From Here to Simultaneity: Criticism against History; Powys: Mr Weston’s Good Wine; Shaw: Saint Joan; Chapter 3 – Never Such Innocence: Versions of Experience and Disillusionment; Dividing Lines; Cracks across History; Triptychal Permutations of War Literature; Ironies of Trench Education: Blunden, Sassoon, Graves; War-Experience in the Novel: The Spanish Farm Trilogy and Kangaroo; Other Disenchantments and Awakenings: Mansfield; The Painted Veil and Mr Fortune’s Maggot; Learning from Experience: Huxley; The Elder Ironists and the End of Innocence; Disillusionment and All That; Chapter 4 – Impunities: Crime, Comedy and Camp; Maugham: The Casuarina Tree; Murder Most Frivolous: Detective Fiction of the Early Golden Age; The Comedy of Crime I: On Stage; Lonsdale: The Last of Mrs Cheyney; Travers: Plunder; The Comedy of Crime II: Narrative Comedy; Waugh: Decline and Fall; Types of Promiscuity; Arlen: The Green Hat; Straying and Misbehaving; Aren’t we all? Amorality and the rise of Camp; Chapter 5 – But It Still Goes On: The Passing of the Twenties; Previews of the Thirties; The Twenties Revisited: Waugh and Isherwood; Conclusions; Works Cited; Index.

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Author Information

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).

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