Writing the 1926 General Strike

Literature, Culture, Politics

Cambridge University Press

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 the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ferrall, Charles

McNeill, Dougal

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Systeme Gewerkschaften, Industrielle Beziehungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhalt

1. St George and the beast: conservative responses to the Strike; 2. The aesthetic fix: Wells, Chesterton, Bennett; 3. In the middle way: Bloomsbury and the General Strike; 4. Lady Chatterley and the end of the world; 5. Poshcrats and the orphan class: the Auden circle in the General Strike; 6. The General Strike and Scottish modernism; 7. The education of desire: labour college radicals, the General Strike and the impossible bildungsroman; 8. Remembering 1926: working-class Welsh modernisms.

Über Autor(innen)

Ferrall, Charles
Charles Ferrall is Senior Lecturer in the English Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. Amongst the books he has published are Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics and Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950, co-authored with Anna Jackson.

McNeill, Dougal
Dougal McNeill is Lecturer in the English Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of Forecasts of the Past: Globalisation, History, Realism, Utopia and has edited special issues of the International Journal of Scottish Literature and the Journal of New Zealand Literature.