Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain

Michael McCluskey is Lecturer in the CAS Writing Program at Boston University, USA. He was previously Lecturer in English at the University of York, UK, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London, UK, and a Research Fellow at metaLAB (at) Harvard, USA. He is working on a monograph on 1930s British documentary. Luke Seaber is Tutor in Modern European Culture on the Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate for the Humanities at University College London, UK. He is author of G.K. Chesterton’s Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony (2012) and Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (Palgrave Macmillan 2017).  He has published various articles and chapters on British literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: Airminded Modernism.- Part I: Observations.- Chapter 2: ‘A Pinch of Inquisitive Pleasure’: Wyndham Lewis, the Great War and Military Surveillance .- Chapter 3: ‘From this new culture of the air we finally see’: ‘Groundmindedness’ in the 1930s.- Chapter 4: Entering British Airspace: Aviation and Film.- Part II: Industry.- Chapter 5: Flying Blind: The Formation of Airmindedness from a Pilot’s Perspective.- Chapter 6: ‘Off the Ground and through the Looking-Glass’: Airliners, Imagination and the Construction of the Modern Air Passenger.- Chapter 7: Flying Dangerously: Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North.- Part III: Influencers.- Chapter 8: ‘True Blue Heroines’: The 1930s Aviatrix and Eccentric Colonial Femininity.- Chapter 9: ‘A Solar Emperor’: Robert Byron Flies East.- Chapter 10: ‘The Fundamental Magic of Flying’: Changing Perspectives in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient and Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Between the Acts.- Part IV: Spectacle.- Chapter 11: Spectre and Spectacle: Mock Air Raids as Aerial Theatre in Interwar Britain.- Chapter 12: Airminded Nationalism: Great Britain and the Schneider Trophy Competition.- Part V: Potential.- Chapter 13: When the Wolves Were Flying: The Box of Delights and Flight in 1930s Children’s Literature.- Chapter 14: ‘The Camels Are Coming’:  W.E. Johns, Biggles, and T. E. Lawrence’s Flight into the Air Force.- Chapter 15: ‘Watch the Skies!’: Guernica, Dresden and the Age of the Bomber in George Orwell and Rex Warner