Back to the Twenties

The Yearbook of English Studies for 2020, edited by Paul Poplawski, is devoted to scholarly essays which take a fresh and probing look at the literary modernism of the 1920s and which, in many cases, also reflect critically on its afterlife through to our own time at the start of the 2020s. As this might suggest, one broad aim of the volume is to set the 1920s in dynamic dialogue with the nascent 2020s. Thus, on the one hand, the volume explores some of the ways in which the inspirations and influences of the 1920s have continued to shape the art, literature and culture of the intervening century, while, on the other hand, it tests the extent to which our contemporary conceptions of modernism can give rise to new readings of the authors, works and movements of the 1920s.

Other than these broad parameters, there is no strong programmatic purpose that unites the essays presented here and the volume should be seen, rather, as a collection of free-standing and highly individual and original studies that seek, each in their own way, to throw into detailed relief some significant features of the modernism of the 1920s as these resonate down the decades to the present.

Engaging in close analysis of a range of texts and topics within international modernism and across several genres (fiction, poetry, drama, film, TV, popular culture and music), the essays in the volume draw on a variety of critical perspectives — including the sociology of literature, ecocriticism, feminism and gender studies, film theory, postcolonialism and print culture studies — and they consider the works of both canonical and less frequently discussed figures from the 1920s and beyond. The writers dealt with include T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Hugh MacDiarmid, Marianne Moore, Toni Morrison, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys, Zadie Smith, Tristan Tzara, Virginia Woolf and W. B. Yeats, but also the murder mystery writer, J. J. Connington, the Russian film pioneer, Sergei Eisenstein, the Welsh modernists, Dorothy Edwards and Rhys Davies, and the working-class writers, Harold Heslop and Ellen Wilkinson.