The Politics of 1930s British Literature Education, Class, Gender [Hardcover]

Drawing on a rich array of archival sources and historical detail,The Politics of 1930s British Literaturetells the story of a school-minded decade and illuminates new readings of the politics and aesthetics of 1930s literature.

In a period of shifting political claims, educational policy shaped writers' social and gender ideals. This book explores how a wide array of writers including Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Winifred Holtby and Graham Greene were informed by their pedagogic work. It considers the ways in which education influenced writers' analysis of literary style and their conception of future literary forms.

The Politics of 1930s British Literatureargues that to those perennial symbols of the 1930s, the loudspeaker and the gramophone, should be added the textbook and the blackboard.

Acknowledgments

Editorial Preface to Historicizing Modernism

Introduction
1. W.H. Auden: Pedagogy and Freedom of Choice in the 1930s
2. Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain and the Politics of Pedagogy inSouth Riding, Honourable EstateandTestament of Youth
3. Writers ofThe Old School: Graham Greene, Walter Greenwood, Stephen Spender, Antonia White and Arthur Calder-Marshall
4. 'Altering the structure of society': Virginia Woolf's Class-Critique of Educational Institutions in the 1930s
5. 'Making Him Our Master': The Eton writers George Orwell, Cyril Connolly and Henry Green
Coda

Bibliography
Index