Event overview
'The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Class, Gender'
Natasha Periyan, University of Kent
In a period of shifting political claims, educational policy shaped writers' social and gender ideals. Natasha Periyan’s recent book The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Gender, Class explores how a wide array of writers including Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Winifred Holtby and Graham Greene were informed by their pedagogic work. It considers the ways in which education influenced writers' analysis of literary style and their conception of future literary forms, and it argues that to those perennial symbols of the 1930s, the loudspeaker and the gramophone, should be added the textbook and the blackboard.
This paper will present two extracts from the book, focusing on Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936) and Virginia Woolf’s lecture ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940). It will consider how aspects of Holtby and Woolf’s class, gender and cultural politics were informed by their organizational involvements with the National Union of Women Teachers and the Workers’ Educational Association respectively. In doing so, the paper will demonstrate how the tenor of the political involvements of these closely networked writers differed.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Jan 2019 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
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