Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins

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.