Description
Book SynopsisIn The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934 1940, Elinor Taylor provides the first study of the relationship between the British novel and the anti-fascist Popular Front strategy endorsed by the Comintern in 1935. Through readings of novels by British Communists including, Taylor shows that the realist novel of the left was a key site in which the politics of anti-fascist alliance were rehearsed. This book at once illuminates the cultural formation of the Popular Front in Britain and proposes a new framework for reading British fiction of this period.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
The Popular Front
Culture, Crisis and Democracy
The Popular Front Novel
Realism and Modernism
1 Anti-Fascist Aesthetics in International Context
Socialist Realism
British Developments
Language, Form and Popularity
Ralph Fox’s Realism
Conclusion
2 John Sommerfield, May Day (1936)
John Sommerfield: Literature and Activism
Vox Populi and Bird’s Eye
Montage and Memory
Myth and Tradition
Conclusion
3 Arthur Calder-Marshall, Pie in the Sky (1937)
Bathos and Narrative Convention
Failures of Articulation
Conclusion
History and the Historical Novel
4 History and the Historical Novel
British Communists and English History
The Historical Novel of the Popular Front
Jack Lindsay’s English Trilogy
Conclusion
Class, Nation, People
5 James Barke and the National Turn
The National Turn (I): British Questions
The National Turn (II): Critical Voices
‘There is no Scottish National Question’
James Barke, Major Operation (1936)
James Barke, The Land of the Leal (1939)
Conclusion
6 Lewis Jones’s Fiction
Shame, Vision and Reification
Forms and Modes
Spain and Home
Conclusion
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
