English Literature of the 1920s

The English literature of the 1920s is commonly treated in terms of its position within European or Anglo-American Modernism. David Ayers argues that the English literature of the period can be better understood when it is examined in the context of a more local social and literary history. Focusing on the novel, this book treats works that are regarded as modernist alongside non-modernist and popular forms, and demonstrates the engagement of these texts with a common context of social concerns, including sexuality, gender and class politics, Englishness, empire, and the cultural pessimism which informed the formation of English as a modern university subject. The book features concise accounts of the social and political contexts of the 1920s and sustained and theoretically sophisticated analyses of key works by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster.