Reviewed by: A History of 1930s British Literature ed. by Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton Michael McCluskey A History of 1930s British Literature. Ed. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 474. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (eBook). While humanities research over the years has taken several turns (spatial, anthropological, historicist, institutional), in A History of 1930s British Literature editors Matthew Taunton and Benjamin Kohlmann take a different approach: the twist. This approach is best expressed by an example that opens contributor Leo Mellor's chapter on "The Documentary Impulse." Mellor includes an excerpt from Arthur Calder-Marshall's novel Pie in the Sky (1937), in which a writer presents his method. As the writer explains, "a wire cable is made of a lot of strands of wire twisted together. … What I want to do is cut the cable and show all the threads interrelated" (257). Taunton and Kohlmann present the 1930s as a thick cable consisting of multiple, twisting strands that each chapter cuts open to consider the interrelated threads of literature, film, music, economics, politics, identity, and geography. They credit Humphrey Jennings's Pandaemonium project (begun in 1938) as the inspiration for their "multi-stranded historical method" (3), but it also calls to mind the "strandentwining cable" in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) as well as the cable-twisting conception of history that Virginia Woolf presents in The Waves (1931): "My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day."1 The single cable represents, for Woolf, one perspective of the past and its relationship to the present. She uses the act of "plaiting" to describe the synthesis of "tumultuous and varied" threads. Yet, elsewhere in the novel, Woolf questions this process: "How can I reduce these dazzling, these dancing apparitions to one line capable of linking all in one?" (145-6). In adopting the image of multiple threads twisted together into a single strand, Woolf also acknowledges the potential for the single strand to unravel—for the cords to be picked apart—to consider the multiple events, experiences, perspectives, and representations entwined in any single conception of history, in any arc or account of an event, a life, a period of time. This double act of strandentwining and unwinding is the aim of the excellent A History of 1930s British Literature. The twenty six chapters consider the tumultuous and varied threads that run throughout the decade and that connect these years to those that come before and after. Indeed, part of Kohlmann and Taunton's project is not just to articulate and examine the particular configurations that marked the 1930s, but to position this period as "a key transformational moment in the cultural and literary history of the twentieth century" (2). These are not just "writers of the thirties," but writers (as well as film-makers, composers, publishers, broadcasters) whose work can help us to understand "institutional, technological and social developments" whose impact we are still seeing today (2). The elephant in the room, of course, is Valentine Cunningham's Writers of the Thirties (1988), but, unlike Orwell, Kohlmann and Taunton ignore the elephant and let him pass with only a brief mention in the introduction. In this way, Kohlmann and Taunton make clear that A History of 1930s British Literature is not a challenge to/revision of Cunningham's "seminal study" as it is not just a study of writers but a study, too, of the events, ideologies, institutions, structures, spaces, and technologies that shaped writers, artists, and other agents as well as much of modern Britain as we know it today (4). This is "why the 1930s should matter" (4) to scholars of other periods and why Kohlmann and Taunton make the case for a "long 1930s" that tracks "the longer arc of literary history" (6), "asks us to rethink the emergence of other large-scale historical trends" (5), and "prompt[s] a rethinking of the hegemonic period categories" such as "late modernism" and "intermodernism" (7). But Kohlmann and Taunton also make a case...