An examination of how wartime rhetoric in World War I influenced the home front fiction of four British women writers -- Violet Hunt, Rose Macaulay, Stella Benson, and Rebecca West.

This book offers the first sustained analysis of the interactions between British writers, propaganda and culture from the Second World War to the Cold War. It traces the involvement of a series of major cultural figures in domestic and international propaganda campaigns and throws new light on the global deployment of British propaganda and cultural diplomacy in colonial and post-colonial theatres such as Cyprus, India and Sierra Leone. Chapters re-evaluate the propaganda work of prominent writers including Arthur Koestler and Dylan Thomas in the light of new archival research, study how organisations including the BBC, British Council and Ministry of Information engaged with new media forms, analyse cultural representations of propaganda service and investigate how British literature and culture was deployed and projected as a form of soft power across the globe. Featuring contributions from a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, visual culture, book history and radio history, this book brings together a constellation of established and emerging scholars to show the crucial role played in shaping and mediating the techniques and content of British information campaigns of the mid-twentieth century.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

Between 1917 and 1919 women enlisted in the Women's Land Army, a national organisation with the task of increasing domestic food production. Behind the scenes organisers laboured to not only recruit an army of women workers, but to also dispel public fears that Britain's Land Girls would be defeminized and devalued by their wartime experiences.

This book is about how ‘The Woman Question’ was represented in works of fiction published between 1850 and 1930. The essays here offer a wide-ranging and original approach to the ways in which literature shaped perceptions of the roles and position of women in society. Debates over ‘The Woman Question’ encompassed not only the struggle for voting rights, but gender equality more widely. The book reaches beyond the usual canonical texts to focus on writers who have, in the main, attracted relatively little critical attention in recent years: Stella Benson, Kate Chopin, Marie Corelli, Dinah Mulock Craik, Clemence Dane, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Gissing, Ouida, and William Hale White (who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Mark Rutherford’). These writers dealt imaginatively with issues such as marriage, motherhood, sexual desire, adultery and suffrage, and they represented female characters who, in varying degrees and with mixed success, sought to defy the social, sexual and political constraints placed upon them. The collection as a whole demonstrates how fiction could contribute in striking and memorable ways to debates over gender equality—debates which continue to have relevance in the twenty-first century.

This volume continues the recent trend towards expanding definitions of war experience through considering a range of different landscapes and voices. Not all landscapes were comprised of trenches and barbed wire. Voices, supporting or dissenting, were many and varied. Collectively, they combine to offer fresh insights into the multiplicity of war experience, alternate spaces to the familiar tropes of mud and mayhem.

This volume brings together a range of essays by eminent and emergent scholars working at the intersection of modern literary, cinema and sound studies. The individual studies ask what specific sonorous qualities are capable of being registered by different modern media, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the ways in which human subjects attend to modern soundscapes. Script, groove, electrical current, magnetic imprint, phonographic vibration: as the contributors show, sound traverses these and other material platforms to become an insistent ground-note of modern aesthetics, one not yet adequately integrated into critical accounts of the period. This collection also provides a commanding and wide-ranging investigation of the conditions under which modernists tapped technically into the rhythms, echoes and sonic architectures of their worlds.

This book is the first collection on the British author Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). The essays establish connections in her work between modernism and the middlebrow, show Macaulay’s attentiveness to reformulating contemporary depictions of gender in her fiction, and explore how her writing transcended and celebrated the characteristics of genre, reflecting Macaulay’s responses to modernity. The book’s focus moves from the interiorized self and the psyche’s relations with the body, to gender identity, to the role of women in society, followed by how women, and Macaulay, use language in their strategies for generic self-expression, and the environment in which Macaulay herself and her characters lived and worked. Macaulay was a particularly modern writer, embracing technology enthusiastically, and the evidence of her treatment of gender and genre reflect Macaulay’s responses to modernism, the historical novel, ruins and the relationships of history and structure, ageing, and the narrative of travel. By presenting a wide range of approaches, this book shows how Macaulay’s fiction is integral to modern British literature, by its aesthetic concerns, its technical experimentation, her concern for the autonomy of the individual, and for the financial and professional independence of the modern woman. There are manifold connections shown between her writing and contemporary theology, popular culture, the newspaper industry, pacifist thinking, feminist rage, the literature of sophistication, the condition of ‘inclusionary’ cosmopolitanism, and a haunted post-war understanding of ruin in life and history. This rich and interdisciplinary combination will set a new agenda for international scholarship on Macaulay’s works, and reformulate contemporary ideas about gender and genre in twentieth-century British literature.

How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poetry and prose resemble Beethoven's compositions. This book takes a different approach. It focuses on how early twentieth-century writers—chief among them E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf—profited from the representational conventions associated in the nineteenth century and beyond with Beethovenian culture. The emphasis of Moonlighting falls for the most part on how modernist writers made use of Beethovenian legend. It is concerned neither with formal similarities between Beethoven's music and modernist writing nor with the music of Beethoven per se, but with certain ways of understanding Beethoven's music which had long before 1900 taken shape as habit, myth, cliché, and fantasy, and with the influence they had on experimental writing up to 1930. Moonlighting suggests that the modernists drew knowingly and creatively on the conventional. It proposes that many of the most experimental works of modernist literature were shaped by a knowing reliance on Beethovenian consensus; in short, that the literary modernists knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it, and that they were eager to use it.

Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and combinations of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals. Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres analyzes West's sense of genres as dynamic and strategic processes with transgressive political ends rather than as fixed and reified taxonomies, a radical new approach at the time that is now mirrored in much contemporary theory. Surveying her oeuvre from this point of view, the book goes on to examine systematically West's writing from 1911-1941, including her early journalism and criticism, such novels as The Return of the Soldier and her controversial multi-genre epic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.