Writing the 1926 General Strike
Literature, Culture, Politics

This book analyses the literary response to the 1926 General Strike and sheds light on the relationship between modernist politics and literature.

Charles Ferrall (Author), Dougal McNeill (Author)

9781107100039, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 February 2015

236 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.7 cm, 0.47 kg

'… Ferrall and McNeill's book offers a captivating reading of a single historical event: the nine-day national strike of 1926, which the authors scrutinize as a benchmark in British political thought between the wars. … a vital resource not only for understanding the conflicted literary history of British labour in the 1920s and after, but also for writing literary history more generally.' The Year's Work in English Studies

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Strikes [KNXB1], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]