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The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London
This book offers a variety of approaches to the topic of London in English literature from the Middle Ages to the present.
Reading the Ruins
From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Yet throughout the years prior to the Second World War, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. They appeared as content, with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper; and also as form, in the shapes of broken poetics. But from the outbreak of the Second World War what had been an aesthetic mode began to resemble a proleptic template. During that conflict many modernist writers – such as Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, David Jones, J. F. Hendry, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot and Rose Macaulay – engaged with devastated cityscapes and the altered lives of a nation at war. To understand the potency of the bombsites, both in the Second World War and after, Reading the Ruins brings together poetry, novels and short stories, as well as film and visual art.
Reading the Ruins
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The Queer Cultures of 1930s Prose
Offering a radical reassessment of 1930s British literature, this volume questions the temporal limits of the literary decade, and broadens the scope of queer literary studies to consider literary-historical responses to a variety of behaviours encompassed by the term ‘queer’ in its many senses. Whilst it is informed by the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, it is also profoundly concerned with what Christopher Isherwood termed ‘the market value of the Odd.’ Drawing, for its methodology, on the work of Raymond Williams, it traces the impact of the Great War on the development of language, examining the use of ten ‘keywords’ in the prose of Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Hamilton, and that of their respective literary milieux, in order to establish how queer lives and modern sub-cultural identities were forged collaboratively within the fictional realm. By utilizing contemporary perspectives on performativity in conjunction with detailed close readings it repositions these authors as self-conscious agents actively producing their own queer masculinities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression.
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment
This authoritative collection of rigorous but accessible essays investigates the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism.
Coming Up for Air
Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the answer will be 'Which war?' The approach of the Second World War finds suburban insurance agent George Bowling in a reflective mood. As he thinks back to the sedate Oxfordshire village of his Edwardian boyhood, he contemplates regretfully what has happened to England since then, from the First World War, in which he served, to the seemingly inescapable money-grubbing and mechanization of everyday life in modern London. A lucky windfall allows Bowling to make a secret return to his idyllic birthplace: a fortifying respite, he hopes, from the struggles of life in a modern city on the verge of war. But is there really any going back? Published in 1939, Coming Up for Air is the most accomplished of Orwell's early realist novels, casting light on the development of Orwell's distinctive thinking as a cultural critic. The novel explores many of the themes Orwell later reprised in 1984: nostalgia, memory, and disillusionment in the face of modernity's ills, including industrialisation, capitalist exploitation, and endless war.
British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime
Demonstrates how spatial and temporal dislocation were defining traits of the artistic response to the urban bombing campaigns of the Second World War. Studying a range of writers, as well as film, photography, and art, it argues that for civilian populations, aerial bombardment distorts the experience of time itself.
British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar
Examines debates central to postwar British culture, showing the pressures of reconstruction and the mutual implication of war and peace.
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II
An overview of writing about the war from a global perspective, aimed at students of modern literature.
Bad Vibrations
Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the perse...
