Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins

The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain General Editor: Randall Stevenson How did literature develop in Britain in the twentieth century? How did it interact with the wider culture and history of the times? Each of the volumes in this series analyses the literary developments of a single decade in their widest contexts. Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins Chris Baldick The first general account of this exceptionally vibrant decade of writing in Britain. Eclipsed until now by the dominant story of Modernism, a much more inclusive range of 1920s literature emerges freshly illuminated in Chris Baldick's approachable history. The Twenties are reclaimed here as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist and non-Modernist currents are shown to engage with common memories and preoccupations. Spanning many genres high and low, including war memoirs, critical essays and detective stories as well as drama, poetry and the novel, Baldick's account situates leading works and authors of the decade - Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence, Huxley, Coward and others - among a rich array of their lesser-known contemporaries to discover common obsessions - especially with the now 'lost' world of pre-War Britain - and shared moods of elegiac despair, nervous frivolity and bold irreverence. Chris Baldick is Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written several works of literary history including /The Modern Movement/ (Oxford, 2004), along with the /Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms/ (2008), and co-edited with Jane Desmarais, /Decadence: An Annotated Anthology/ (Manchester, 2012).

Chris Baldick is Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written several works of literary history including The Modern Movement (Oxford, 2004), along with the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (2008), and co-edited with Jane Desmarais Decadence: An Annotated Anthology (Manchester, 2012).