Luke Seaber

What constitutes a villain? How does villainy differ from evil? Is Captain Hook a villain - or is Peter Pan? Do portrayals of villainy from places as far apart as the Yemen, Italy and Ireland show common characteristics? Do villains created for children's fiction differ from those created for adults? This volume attempts to answer these questions.Rev. and enlarged papers from the second interdisciplinary conference on 'Villains and Villainy' held at Oriel College, Oxford, in September 2010.

Essays on the Relationship Between Villainy and Evil

Villains and Heroes, Or Villains as Heroes?

Michael McCluskey

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain looks at the impact of aviation in Britain and beyond through the 1920s and 1930s. This book considers how in this period flying went from a weapon of war to an extensive industry that included civilian air travel, air mail delivery, flying shows and campaigns to create ‘airmindedness’. Essays look at these developments through the work of writers, filmmakers and flyers and examines the airminded modernism that marked this radical period. Its fourteen chapters include studies of texts by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, W.H. Auden, T.H. White and John Masefield; accounts of the annual RAF Display at Hendon and the Schneider Trophy; and the achievements of celebrity flyers such as Amy Johnson. This collection provides a fresh perspective on the interwar period by bringing analysis of aviation and airmindedness to the study of British literature, history, modernism, mobilities and the history of technology and transportation.

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain

This book is the first full critical history of incognito social investigation texts – in other words, works detailing their authors’ experiences whilst pretending to be poor. The most famous example is Down and Out in Paris and London, but there has been a vast array of other works in the genre since it was created in 1866 by James Greenwood’s ‘A Night in a Workhouse’. It draws up a classification of incognito social investigation texts, dividing them into four subtypes. The first comprises those texts following most narrowly in James Greenwood’s footsteps, taking the extreme poor as their object of study. The next is the investigation of poverty through walking, for pedestrianism and poverty are fascinatingly linked. The third is that of people looking at relative poverty rather than absolute, where authors take on badly-paid work in order to report on it, which is when incognito social investigation becomes very much something carried out by women. We end looking at those incognito social investigators who settled in the areas they explored. Not only will this book recover the history of a genre that has long been ignored, however, but it will also offer significant close reading of many of the texts that it places within the tradition(s) it discovers.

Certainties in Degradation

Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature

Villains and Heroes, or Villains as Heroes? Essays on the Relationship between Villainy and Evil

Nick Hubble

Elinor Taylor

With austerity biting hard and fascism on the march at home and abroad, the Britain of the 1930s grappled with many problems familiar to us today. Moving beyond the traditional focus on 'the Auden generation', this book surveys the literature of the period in all its diversity, from working class, women, queer and postcolonial writers to popular crime and thriller novels. In this way, the book explores the uneven processes of modernization and cultural democratization that characterized the decade. A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, the book covers such writers as Eric Ambler, Mulk Raj Anand, Katharine Burdekin, Agatha Christie, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Christopher Isherwood, Storm Jameson, Ethel Mannin, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christina Stead, Evelyn Waugh and many others.

Luke Seaber

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