Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars

ISBN-13: 9780415016612 / Angielski / Twarda / 1991 / 300 str.

Alison Light;Light Alison

Opis

Most studies of the interwar years have focused upon literary elites, rendering the period and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognize how much ideas of national identity were bound up with notions of femininity and private life. Boldly moving across the culture, from the highbrow novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett to the detective fiction of Agatha Christie, the author traces the making of a conservative national temperament between the wars, at once defensive and protective, and yet modernizing in outlook. Whether analyzing the significance of the whodunnit, the appeal of historical romance, or the creation of a middlebrow culture, the author attempts to evoke a powerful sense of the pleasures of reading and writing, as well as offering an intimate picture of interwar life from inside the heartlands of the English middle classes.

Spis treści

Introduction; Chapter 1 The demon in the house: the novels of I. Compton-Burnett; Chapter 2 Agatha Christie and conservative modernity; Chapter 3 ‘Peace in our time’: Mrs. Miniver; Chapter 4 Daphne du Maurier's romance with the past Afterword; Appendix: Mrs. Miniver writes to The Times; Notes; Bibliography Index;

O autorze

Alison Light