Literature of the 'Thirties

The literature of the 1930s occupies an important and complex position in critical accounts of modern British and Irish writing. Unlike terms such as modernism and postmodernism, writing of the 1930s does not announce itself as an “ism,” seeming at first glance to operate as a neutral label for writing that happens to have been published in the period 1930–1939. Like modernism and postmodernism, however—indeed in some ways even more so—the term is, in practice, associated with a specific set of thematic concerns, aesthetic approaches, and political commitments. The unique literary mythology of the “Red Decade” was being deliberately and self-consciously encoded by key protagonists before the decade was out, with W. H. Auden influentially regretting the “clever hopes” of a “low, dishonest decade” in his poem “September 1, 1939.” Auden’s own accounts of his dalliance with left-wing, committed writing and his subsequent disillusionment—mirrored by the trajectories of Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and others—helped to consolidate a narrative of the decade’s literature as one that began with the articulation of overweening “clever hopes,” and ended as these were exposed as dangerous, adolescent illusions. The thirties, for some time, operated as a convenient box for the idea of committed literature. The decade confronted students of modern literature like a carefully curated museum display designed to illustrate the folly of mixing political commitment with literature. Yet this familiar narrative of the decade’s writing is modeled around the particular experiences of a few, largely male, upper-middle-class poets. Since the 1980s, the general tendency of scholarship has been to complicate or unpick this narrative, expanding the canon beyond the Auden circle, emphasizing continuities with the modernism of the 1920s, and producing more nuanced accounts of committed literature that are not bound up with its inevitable failure. These shifts have gone along with a rising tide of scholarly interest in previously neglected women writers, including Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among many others. In our own troubled political times, literature of the ‘thirties continues to provoke and fascinate because of the important questions it poses about writing and commitment, even while the forms of commitment and the range of writers studied under this heading have proliferated. Through this process an excessively tidy literary-historical narrative has increasingly been replaced by something messier, more open ended, and ultimately more interesting.