Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939

Abstract

Introduction - irony, modernism and tradition - modes of interpretation irony and modern memory, tradition triumphant - echoes of the past in literature, modernists versus traditionalists, the middlebrow novel the Baedeker of the memory of war, mapping out the terrain of the interwar years. Part 1 The accountability of imagination: social background and non literary occupation, the intimate world of publishing, the testimony of the Old guard, fiction as history, writing with a purpose, the English memory of war, Morality as a strategy of social and political renewal, safeguarding the individual against the mob, the middle of the road. Part 2 The invisible hand of the cause: the strength of inarticulate patriotism, the enemy, disenchantment in the novels of the late 1920s and 1930s, personal war. Part 3 Standards are Different Here - recasts identity: the separate world of the men at fear, communion with the dead, spiritual language, homefront conscientious objectors, defining English identity against German character, women and war, a generation apart. Part 4 The quest for continuity: preserving the past the old order reabsorption into the old pattern, military tradition. Part 5 The theatre of - Journey's End: the plot of Journey's End journey to success the response of the press, the experience of 2nd Lieutenant Sherriff, Sherriff's literary reconstruction of his experience Sherriff and Hibbert, the public-school matrix of Journey's End, the play's title, the war consciousness of Journey's End, providing a social message simplicity as a style of life and literature, revisited rather than revived. Conclusion: summary, the centre can hold.