Whatever happened to realism? What form is adequate to representing our moment, situated as we are after the end of the end of History ? In the face of youth revolts and workers insurgencies from Cairo to London, it seems a good time to test the possibilities of alternative Marxist defences of contemporary realist fiction. Can realism s techniques adequately represent the complexity of contemporary political organisation? This book reads key realist texts from recent decades in order to test their potential to produce the knowledge of history, industrial politics and the metropolis...

Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike . The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike as well as...

These essays explore connections between the social and political upheavals of the interwar years and British literature in that period.