Wasley, Aidan
TR 11:10 AM
Park Hall 136
Life During Wartime: British Literature and Culture 1914-1945
This course will study in depth the literary culture of Britain in the years during and between the First and Second World Wars—the period Virginia Woolf calls, in the title of her last novel, “between the acts.” We will examine a range of literary genres, including poetry, novels, essays, and documentary reportage, alongside a contextualizing selection of contemporary films, visual art, and music. Among the themes we will explore: the impact and aftermath of the First World War; the relationship between British art and politics against the backdrop of the rise of fascism; responses to the legacy of British imperialism and modern consumer capitalism; changing and competing definitions of “Britishness"; issues of documentary realism versus artistic metaphor and the consolidation of Modernism; the cultural afterlife of the war and interwar period in the British imagination; as well as questions of sexuality, class, and British regionalism.
Authors and artists whose work we will study include Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Rebecca West, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Alfred Hitchcock, Virginia Woolf, and others.