Assessment
This 10-credit module ran for 4 years until 2000.
This module will consider a range of British narrative
prose and poetry from the inter-War period, and refer also to
American writing from this period as a means of illustrating parallels
and continuities. The texts to be studied enable discussion of
a range of issues: responses to Imperialism; responses to modern
consumer capitalist 'mass society'; treatment of issues of faith,
belief and commitment; the impact of science and technology in
the modern world; questions of individuality and personal authenticity;
and issues of the roles and responsibilities of the writer. Issues
of realism versus modernism, the impact of new aesthetic modes
(cinematic and social realism, "stream of consciousness"
techniques, the use of myth, metaphor and symbol) will also be
addressed throughout the module.
The aims of this course are as follows:
Timetable
| Week(s) | Session |
| 1 | Introductory Lecture: "Literature and Society in the Inter-War Years"; |
| 2 - 3 | T S Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) |
| 4 - 5 | E M Forster, A Passage to India (1924) |
| 6 - 7 | F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) |
| 8 - 9 | Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Between the Acts (1941) |
| 10 - 11 | Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) |
| - - - Christmas Vacation - - - - | |
| 12 - 13 | George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) |
| 14 | Graham Greene, Brighton Rock |
Required Reading
Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties,
(OUP, 1989)
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History
of Great Britain 1918-1939, (1940)
Edward Hynes, The Auden Generation (Bodley Head, 1976)
Recommended Reading
Baxendale, J., Narrating the 1930s, (Macmillan, 1996)
Bernard Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties, (Blackwell,1978)
(ed) Buccoli, M., New Essays on The Great Gatsby, (CUP,
1985)
(ed) Clarke, J., Culture and Crisis in Britain in the 1930s,
(Lawrence and Wishart, 1979)
Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the
Wars (OUP, 1980)
Frank Gloversmith, Class, Culture and Social Change: A New
View of the 1930s (Harvester, 1980)
Richard Johnstone, The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen
Thirties, (OUP, 1982)
Menand, L., Discovering Modernism: T S Eliot and his Context,
(OUP,1987)
Pykett, L., Engendering Fiction, (Arnold, 1995)
Spender, S., The Thirties and After, (Macmillan, 1978)
Spender, S, Love:Hate Relations (Hamilton, 1974)
George Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain
(OUP, 1977)
Zwerdling, A, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, (California
UP., 1986)