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The Question of Socialist Writing and Sylvia Townsend Warner in the Thirties
Author(s) -
Ewins Kristin
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00545.x
Subject(s) - townsend , politics , communism , ideology , modernism (music) , power (physics) , great depression , literature , flourishing , left wing politics , history , sociology , aesthetics , law , art , political science , psychology , physics , quantum mechanics , psychotherapist
This essay was runner‐up in the 2007Literature CompassGraduate Essay Prize, Twentieth Century & Contemporary Section. The 1930s was a time of crisis, ideological extremism and impending war. Few writers remained untouched by the political turmoil following the Great Depression in the West and Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The impulse of authors to involve themselves in politics at this time is suggested by the high number of radical and conservative periodicals flourishing in the 1930s. There also emerged divisive debate on the role of writers in shaping contemporary politics, battled out in a steady stream of international conferences. This article introduces one such controversy: the hostile debate between proponents of socialist writing and modernism culminating in the notorious Writers’ Congress in Moscow in 1934. I then look in more detail at how one Communist writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, negotiated such debate in her journalism and literary writing: a regular contributor to the left‐wing journal Left Review , Warner provides an illustrative example of a writer who bridged the gulf between ideas of writing as a purely political or aesthetic form of expression.