Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain. By Christine Grandy

Abstract

The First World War cast a long shadow over Europe (and indeed many other parts of the world), and in Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain Christine Grandy explores how the war impacted on the ways in which popular culture was consumed in Britain in the years following the conflict. To do this Grandy chooses to evaluate two of the most popular leisure activities of the interwar period: cinema-going and reading. This period witnessed a significant boom for these leisure pursuits. The cinema-going habit flourished as the film medium matured and a large number of purpose-built “picture palaces” sprung up across the country to supplement the many thousands of cinema halls that already operated, while the market for popular fiction grew significantly as the publishing industry transformed its working practices, public libraries became more accessible, and low-cost circulating libraries—particularly twopenny libraries—opened up in convenient locations in both towns and rural areas. It is within this thriving cultural milieu that Grandy sets out to evaluate the most popular films and novels that the British chose to consume in the interwar period and assess their reasons for choosing them. Attempting to chart these is of course extremely difficult due to the rarity of extant archival material. However, by casting the net widely and drawing on a vast range of source material, from exhibitors’ catalogues, reviews in popular newspapers, periodicals, and trade magazines, to the records drawn up by leading scholars in the field, such as Clive Bloom, Joseph McAleer, Billie Melman, and Maria Bracco (for novels), and Christine Gledhill, Sue Harper, Annette Kuhn, and John Sedgwick (for films), Grandy convincingly identifies a body of works from which she can begin to conduct her analysis.