The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940

by Elinor Taylor

Overview

In 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 Jack Lindsay, John Sommerfield, Lewis Jones, and James Barke, Taylor shows that the realist novel of the left was a key site in which the politics of anti-fascist alliance were rehearsed. Maintaining a dialogue with theories of populism and with Georg Lukács’s vision of a revived literary realism ensuing from the Popular Front, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608460465
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Series:	Historical Materialism , #153
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Elinor Taylor, Ph.D. (2014), University of Salford, is currently a lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She is the author of several articles on Communist writers.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
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