Andrew Frayn – författare

It has become axiomatic that First World War literature was disenchanted, or disillusioned, and returning combatants were unable to process or communicate that experience. In Writing disenchantment, Andrew Frayn argues that this was not just about the war: non-combatants were just as disenchanted as those who fought, and writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf produced some of the sharpest criticisms. Its language already existed in contemporary sociological and historical accounts of the problems of mass culture and the modern city, whose structures contained the conflict and were strengthened during it. Archival material, sales data and reviews are used to chart disenchantment in a wide range of early twentieth-century war literature from novels about fears of invasion and pacifism, through the modernist novels of the 1920s to its dominance in the War Books Boom of 1928–30. This book will appeal to scholars and students of English literature, social and cultural history, and gender studies.

Underlining (and undermining) the notion of literary merit, this book focuses on noncanonical works and asks: what happens when we look away from modernism?Seeking an alternative history of British literature from 1890 to 1945, this book reflects on the processes by which canonicity happens by studying less familiar authors, othered by genre, gender and form. This book deliberately looks away from the British modernist canon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, bringing into sharp relief the problematic nature of discussions about literary merit.Engaging with topics such as politics, nation and identity in bestsellers, work straddling art and literature, the complex relationships between conservatism and progressive movements such as suffragism, and the importance of popular science writing, in authors such as Stella Benson, Dorothy Edwards, Violet Hunt and Hugh Walpole, it brings to bear valuable new perspectives on the cultural history of this period.

Underlining (and undermining) the notion of literary merit, this book focuses on noncanonical works and asks: what happens when we look away from modernism? Seeking an alternative history of British literature from 1890 to 1945, this book reflects on the processes by which canonicity happens by studying less familiar authors, othered by genre, gender and form. This book deliberately looks away from the British modernist canon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, bringing into sharp relief the problematic nature of discussions about literary merit. Engaging with topics such as politics, nation and identity in bestsellers, work straddling art and literature, the complex relationships between conservatism and progressive movements such as suffragism, and the importance of popular science writing, in authors such as Stella Benson, Dorothy Edwards, Violet Hunt and Hugh Walpole, it brings to bear valuable new perspectives on the cultural history of this period.