Chris Hopkins

Walter Greenwood’s 'Love on the Dole': Novel, Play, Film

This book gives the fullest account so far of the origins, success and public impact of Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole in all three of its versions: novel (1933), play (1935) and film (1941) and also the fullest existing account of its authors literary career and status as the most celebrated working-class writer of the nineteen thirties, drawing on much previously unexplored archive material.

The potential therapeutic benefits of reading poetry to nursing home residents : the road less travelled?

ABSTRACT In this paper we report on a project to take poetry into a nursing home, building on the widely-held belief in the benefits of poetry in therapeutic settings. This intervention involved us reading poetry aloud in a nursing home and reflecting on how residents reacted to these texts. Our findings suggest that talking about the poetry allowed members of this community to self-reflect and tell narratives that were important to them. Sometimes the poem served as a catalyst, encouraging the disclosure of poignant stories, while at other times the poems seemed incidental to the stories told by the group. Our subsequent reflections also suggested to us that there were several areas that needed further exploration. The poems are not delivered straight to the listener with no mediation; rather, the poems and the discussion afterwards are mediated by both the general expectations and particular interventions of the audience and the facilitators.

Reviews: Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930sBenjaminKohlmann, Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. ix + 223, £60.00.

Benjamin Kohlmann’s monograph revisits a topic which in broad terms has been much discussed by critics writing about the 1920s and 1930s: the relationship between the modernist aesthetics which are seen as dominating ‘highbrow’ literature in the first of these decades and the more explicitly committed aesthetic emerging and becoming dominant in the succeeding decade. However, the coverage is perhaps not as broad as the book title might seem to imply. Here the reader will not find, for example, discussions of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s own peculiar committed style and her much debated relationship to modernism, nor more than a brief discussion of Storm Jameson’s theoretical rejection of modernism and considerable response in her fiction to T. S. Eliot (indeed, there is practically no discussion here of women writers of the period, though there is discussion of why on page ten). Equally, the reader will find nothing on Henry Green’s experiments with modernism in his (somewhat committed?) novels Living (1929) and Partygoing (1939), nor of responses in George Orwell’s fiction to D. H. Lawrence or James Joyce, nor of Graham Greene’s leftist stream-of-consciousness novel, England Made Me (1935) or his subsequent obsession with the possibility of delivering social critique through use of thriller sub-genres. Instead the study focuses on a very particular range of writers: William Empson, English Surrealists (Hugh Sykes Davies, David Gascoyne), Mass-Observers (Tom Harrison, Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge) and Edward Upward. However, there is a very clear rationale for this focus:

Beyond Fiction? The Example of Winged Warfare (1918)

The project of this volume is to look afresh at the literature of the Great War from the perspectives of the twentieth century’s end. The new perspectives that have become possible recently include the development of both new critical approaches and new areas of interest which have come into being since the publication of the standard works of the 1960s and 1970s (such as Bernard Bergonzi’s Heroes Twilight-A Study of the Literature of the Great Warm 1965, Holger Klein’s edited collection of critical essays The First World War in Fiction in 1976, and Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory in 1979). The new critical approaches and methodologies are, of course, part of the general interest in the insights of theory across all areas of literary studies. The new focuses of interest are also related to this development, particularly as it touches questions about the canon and the construction of literary history. Thus both popular fiction/culture about the War and fictions by women have received an increasing amount of attention. My own project in this essay belongs to the second of these two types of new perspective — it seeks to explore the possibilities of a new area, brought to light at least in part by some recent critical developments. Within that, though, it looks at an area which, while lying solidly within the ambit of traditional interest in the Great War, has been oddly neglected.

Victorian Modernity? Writing the Great Exhibition

There is no question that for Victorian Britain the Great Exhibition became a defining event for mapping not just ‘The Progress of the Nation’,1 but the whole progress of mankind into a modern age. Account after account among the enormous quantity of writing inspired by the Exhibition represented it as an unprecedented experience, a landmark of the extent of human self-transformation, and a starting point for yet further development. Prince Albert’s characterisation of the aims of the Exhibition at his Mansion House Banquet speech of 1850 makes these points forcefully: Nobody... who had paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition... Gentlemen — the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions2 Other accounts gave, with varying emphases, a similar sense of the Exhibition’s uniqueness and promise. Henry Cole, prime mover with Albert of the Exhibition, wrote in comparatively restrained terms that ‘for the first time in the world’s history, the men of Arts, Science, and Commerce were permitted by their respective governments to meet together to discuss and promote those objects for which civilised nations exist’.3