Valentine Cunningham

This wide-ranging study of British writers and poets of the 1930s--including Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Waugh, and Greene-- examines the masterpieces of that momentous decade, not in linguistic isolation, but in the contexts--social, political, historical, ideological, and personal--in which they were composed. Cunningham maps out the dominant images and concerns, nothing less than the central obsessions and imposing images of the '30s imagination. He analyzes the obsession with violence, the "destructive element" of post-World War consciousness; the cult of youth, of schools and schoolmasters; the infatuation with heroes--flyers, mountaineers, and racing car drivers--and the related concern about "being small," weak, or neurotic in an age of mass politics. In order to illustrate this kaleidoscope of themes, Cunningham examines not only the canonical texts, but also "minor" forms and writings, including detective stories, films, and popular songs, showing how these neglected genres also illuminate the work of this period.

British Writers of the Thirties

Duncan Wu

This volume distils into two hundred pages some of the most influential poetry of the Victorian period. Distils into one volume the key poems of the Victorian era. Organised chronologically, allowing readers to perceive continuities and changes through the century. Includes a general introduction, giving readers an overview of the poets and the period. Represents texts in their entirety where possible.

Victorian Poetry

H. Gustav Klaus

Premised on the belief that a social and an ecological agenda are compatible, this collection offers readings in the ecology of left and radical writing from the Romantic period to the present. While early ecocriticism tended to elide the bitter divisions within and between societies, recent practitioners of ecofeminism, environmental justice, and social ecology have argued that the social, the economic and the environmental have to be seen as part of the same process. Taking up this challenge, the contributors trace the origins of an environmental sensibility and of the modern left to their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charting the ways in which the literary imagination responds to the political, industrial and agrarian revolutions. Topics include Samuel Taylor Coleridge's credentials as a green writer, the interaction between John Ruskin's religious and political ideas and his changing view of nature, William Morris and the Garden City movement, H. G. Wells and the Fabians, the devastated landscapes in the poetry and fiction of the First World War, and the leftist pastoral poetry of the 1930s. In historicizing and connecting environmentally sensitive literature with socialist thought, these essays explore the interactive vision of nature and society in the work of writers ranging from William Wordsworth and John Clare to John Berger and John Burnside.

The Red and the Green

Ecology and the Literature of the British Left

This book is the definitive guide to Victorian poetry, which its author approaches in the light of modern critical concerns and contemporary contexts. Valentine Cunningham exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the poetry produced in this period and offers dazzling close readings of a number of well-known poems Draws on the work of major Victorian poets and their works as well as many of the less well-known poets and poems Reads poems and poets in the light of both Victorian and modern critical concerns Places poetry in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and ideological context Organized in terms of the Victorian anxieties of self, body, and melancholy Argues that rhyming/repetition is the major formal feature of Victorian poetry Highlights the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small poems Shows how Victorian poetry attempts to engage with the modern subject and how its modernity segues into modernism and postmodernism

Poets, Poems and Poetics

Victorian Poetry Now

The Spanish Civil War--the most momentous political and cultural flashpoint of the 1930s--struck deep into the conscience and conciousness of the West. This anthology offers a vivid, moving, and often surprising cross-section of the writing it generated--prose and poetry, public and private, documentary and fictional, convinced and skeptical, left-wing and right-wing. It includes contributions from a number of lesser-known authors, as well as the famous names, and the distinctive participation of women is ehre recognized and represented for the first time. The book shows writers taking sides; reflecting on the war's progress in essays, diaries, letters, journalism, poems, stories, and novels; reporting their visits to the fighting zones; and expressing their responses ranging from hope to despair, from satisfaction to horror. Included are selections from Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Randall Jarrell, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Leon Trotsky, Vita Sackville-West, Claude Simon, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, George Orwell, John Dos Passos, Helen Waddell, David Gascoyne, Antonia White, Ford Madox Ford, and many more. The publication of this book is timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Writers on the Civil War

Spanish Front

Lear is too much. There’s too much to stomach, an overdoing of massive wickednesses which rightly provoked perhaps the most famous reaction to King Lear ever, Dr Samuel Johnson’s horror in his Prefaces to his Shakespeare (1765) over the blinding of Gloucester –“an act too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition” – and the death of Cordelia: “contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles”. There are indeed just too many awful enhancements of the Lear stories Shakespeare drew on, a superfluity of terrible things – and of course these, as Valentine Cunningham says, are uneasily central to a play which teaches the immorality of the well-off having a “superflux” of money and things when the poor have so little. So what explains the dramatic success of Lear? The great critic A.C. Bradley had grave reservations about it, but he conceded, this play was the “fullest revelation of Shakespeare’s power” – up there with Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Beethoven’s symphonies and Michelangelo’s statues; the most moving and daunting of tragic experiences the world has ever known promoted by a greatly trashy plot, or, as the poet and critic D. J. Enright puts in his lively book about teaching Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Students (1970): “It is possible that Shakespeare never did anything more awe-inspiring, more improbable-seeming than this – to take a petulant old retired monarch, drive him mad and stick flowers in his hair, and still end with a figure of tragedy.”

Valentine Cunningham

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