Abstract/Summary

This thesis is a literary study of popular writing (novels and poetry) in the year 1922 to enable a fuller characterisation of these twelve months by recovering a lost literary history. Offering a new and very different view of this year the research undertakes an historicist analysis of some of the year’s bestselling poetry and prose, the wider culture, and the mainstream publishing industry which capitalised on the continuing trend towards mass, popular publishing. Based on original primary research in the Archive of British Publishing and Printing at the University of Reading, the Macmillan Archive at the British Library, and the Hodder and Stoughton Limited files at the London Metropolitan Archives, the thesis explores profit and loss ledgers, stock books, advertising material, reviews, and correspondence often previously unconsidered. The research includes a case study of the publication of two Chatto and Windus titles by Aldous Huxley and Beverley Nichols. It considers the crime writing of Victor Bridges, Agatha Christie, ‘Sapper’, J. S. Fletcher and Cyril Alington in the emerging Golden Age. After debating the romantic fiction of Ethel M. Dell, Elinor Glyn and Ruby M. Ayres, a final chapter discusses the popular poetry of Thomas Hardy, Edmund Blunden and A. E. Housman in the aftermath of the Great War. This thesis argues that it is necessary to re-frame ideas about 1922, which has consistently been misrepresented in earlier studies that have privileged the work of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others. As such this is a study centrally concerned with cultural issues of value and the interactions between social context and the publications of the day. This work recuperates some of the important novels and poems otherwise lost to history, those texts that intrigued and excited readers, whilst acknowledging that modernist writing itself is often thematically contiguous with the popular literature it eschewed. This research offers a valuable and countervailing narrative to that offered by previous literary history.