Unseen Prose Contexts

Railways

• Railways promoted domestic and international travel

• Access to grand-tour destinations and day-trips

Women

• Progression in women’s freedoms from the Suffragettes

• Still a widely expressed desire for voice, agency, and power

Leisure

• Invention of 5 day working week + economic stability and affluence + more libraries = greater national readership

• Golden age of detective genre - microcosm of contemporary conservative attitudes

Critique of bourgeoisie

• Woolf in To the Lighthouse, and others promoted idea that one should live contently with less - simple pleasures

• Enslavement to capitalist mechanism for great wealth frowned upon

• Woolf campaigned for individual liberty against social conformity

• Questioning of patriarchy

Political Novels

• It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis reacts to the rise of totalitarianism and the dangers of consumerism

• Cautionary tale about development of dangerous internal ideologies

Escapism

• Exhibits a wilful blindness to political developments

• Illusionment

• Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons

War

• Romanticisation - tales of terror and bravery from Great War - detached from brutal reality

• Proliferation of spy novel

Physcoanalysis and sexuality

• Freud’s influence - new lens on the individual and interior

• Lady Chatterly’s Lover, DH Lawrence - shattered British squeamishness about sex - progressive

• Obscenity trial in Britain

Modernism

• Spawned from WWI disillusionment

• Subversive style - Rejection of Romantic, exterior notions for a focus on the self

• Ulysses by James Joyce + Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

• Showed up futility of English styles

Modernity’s Alienation

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - controversial cautionary tale about the dangers of urban expansion and technology

• The horror of Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it

Impact of Film

• Golden age of Hollywood

• Influences on immediacy, dialogue and visual storytelling