Reading the Thirties: Texts and Contexts

This book is not about all of the literature written in England between 1930 and 1940. In the title, and throughout the book, British literary scholar and critic Bernard Bergonzi uses the term "the thirties" in a deliberately selective fashion. He does not intend "the thirties" to mean just a period, but also to refer generically to a group of writers and the work they produced, mostly in that decade, occasionally later. Indeed, "the thirties" in this sense largely corresponds to what Samuel Hynes calls "the Auden generation." The thirties generation mythologised themselves as they lived and wrote, and the author has long been fascinated by the mythology. His interest is less in extendedly discussing individual authors, or individual texts, than in trying to read the thirties as a collective subject, even a collective text. The approach involves certain departures from the familiar methods and assumptions of English criticism, and not all of this book can be called literary criticism, though all of it stays close to literary texts. Where it is not criticism it moves towards cultural history and the sociology of literature, although the author should like to think that all three approaches can be kept in a coherent and mutually supportive relation. This book had, in fact, two points of departure, notes the author. One of them was the interest in the typology and mythology of the thirties just referred to. The other, of a more theoretical kind, was interest in the nature of a literary period, and how far it can be described or even defined in terms of regular and recurring structural constituents.