Book contents
- ‘The People’ and British Literature
- Cambridge Themes in British Literature and Culture
- ‘The People’ and British Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- General Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Popular Democracy, Representation, and the People
- Part II The Revolutionary People
- Chapter 6 The People and the English Civil Wars
- Chapter 7 ‘The Scattered Million’
- Chapter 8 Revolutionary Horizons, Reformist Hopes
- Chapter 9 Experiments in Left Populism
- Part III ‘One of Us’
- Part IV In the Name of the People
- Part V The People Now
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 9 - Experiments in Left Populism
British Literature between the Wars
from Part II - The Revolutionary People
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2025
Book contents
- ‘The People’ and British Literature
- Cambridge Themes in British Literature and Culture
- ‘The People’ and British Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- General Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Popular Democracy, Representation, and the People
- Part II The Revolutionary People
- Chapter 6 The People and the English Civil Wars
- Chapter 7 ‘The Scattered Million’
- Chapter 8 Revolutionary Horizons, Reformist Hopes
- Chapter 9 Experiments in Left Populism
- Part III ‘One of Us’
- Part IV In the Name of the People
- Part V The People Now
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the place and significance of ‘the people’ and ‘the popular’ in left-wing literary discourse between the wars, concentrating on the leftwards shift among literary intellectuals in the 1930s. It connects a widespread literary fascination with the idea of a ‘popular voice’ and the notion of popular literary ‘content’ to political shifts in Britain and on the international scene, particularly the rise of fascism and concomitant developments in the cultural politics of the Communist International. It examines the left-wing journal Left Review and a selection of left-oriented poetry anthologies as sites in which questions of the relationship between writers, literary forms, and popular audiences were negotiated.
Keywords
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 'The People' and British LiteratureBelonging, Exclusion, and Democracy, pp. 141 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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