The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.

This chapter considers the associations between animality and aviation in the 1930s. It begins by explaining how Garnett’s reading of the Russian entomologist Boris Uvarov was crucial to his completion of his novel The Grasshoppers Come (1931), which contains such convincing depictions of insects that Uvarov suspected Garnett had viewed them first-hand (the letters Uvarov wrote to Garnett are here reproduced for the first time). Reading this novel alongside his diary-record of learning to fly, A Rabbit in the Air (1932), the first half of the chapter goes on to analyse how Garnett’s texts present an aesthetics of flight that hinges on connections and dissonances between human, animal and machine. The second part illustrates how Garnett’s aeronautical writing extended to the context of war and the publication of War in the Air (1941), which he wrote for the Air Ministry. By avoiding associations that had by the Second World War become bound up in nationalist bombast, Garnett subverts the increasingly masculinist and militarist approach to technology and animality found in other writings as the decade progressed.

This chapter explores the structure of society and the composition of the Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Belgium and France from the late nineteenth century until 1941 (when the ‘Jewish Councils’ were established). It highlights the similarities and differences between the three countries’ social structures in this period. These include the number and outlook of (Eastern European) Jewish immigrants, the presence of official religious Jewish representation and Jewish integration in non-Jewish society in each case. Central themes are the level of integration of Jews into the non-Jewish communities, the position of immigrant Jews vis-à-vis the longstanding Jewish population, the level of religious adherence, the influence of Zionist thinking, the role of religious institutions and the organisational structure of the Jewish communities. This chapter also examines the institution of Jewish refugee organisations in the 1930s, and the position of the later chairmen of the “Jewish Councils” in Western Europe in these pre-war refugee aid organisations. Moreover, it addresses the establishment of so-called Coordinating Committees in 1940, either by German demand, or by initiative of Jewish community members, which aimed to oversee all Jewish philanthropic work and sought to unite the various Jewish communities. It argues that the supposed failures of these committees served as the springboard for establishing the ‘Jewish Councils’.

This chapter explores the structure of society and the composition of the Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Belgium and France from the late nineteenth century until 1941 (when the ‘Jewish Councils’ were established). It highlights the similarities and differences between the three countries’ social structures in this period. These include the number and outlook of (Eastern European) Jewish immigrants, the presence of official religious Jewish representation and Jewish integration in non-Jewish society in each case. Central themes are the level of integration of Jews into the non-Jewish communities, the position of immigrant Jews vis-à-vis the longstanding Jewish population, the level of religious adherence, the influence of Zionist thinking, the role of religious institutions and the organisational structure of the Jewish communities. This chapter also examines the institution of Jewish refugee organisations in the 1930s, and the position of the later chairmen of the “Jewish Councils” in Western Europe in these pre-war refugee aid organisations. Moreover, it addresses the establishment of so-called Coordinating Committees in 1940, either by German demand, or by initiative of Jewish community members, which aimed to oversee all Jewish philanthropic work and sought to unite the various Jewish communities. It argues that the supposed failures of these committees served as the springboard for establishing the ‘Jewish Councils’.

Few themes have greater longevity in Britten studies than politics. Conventionally, Britten abandoned his overt political engagement of the 1930s – symbolised by his departure to the United States – finding, through a process of self-discovery, a breadth of human expression that transcended the slogans of politicised art in Peter Grimes. Britten’s pacifism and left-wing politics have formed – with his sexuality – a nexus of othered identity that was, as Pears had it, ‘outside the pale’ in British society of the mid-twentieth century. However, this dichotomy of self and other risks rendering British society an undifferentiated landscape of political and social conservatism. This, in turn, prevents consideration of how Britten’s left-wing pacifism intersected with broader trends and attitudes, and other radical individuals, as well as of the place of politics within his myriad, complex interactions with such conventional institutions as the BBC or the monarchy. It is thus timely to reconsider how communism, socialism, and pacifism intersected with Britten’s musical career, exploring the history of these terms, and how they influenced aesthetics, cultural practice, and individuals.

This chapter focusses on two refugee movements caused by the Nazi regime: Jews and dissidents from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia seeking refuge before the outbreak of war in September 1939; and Dutch and Belgium refugees who arrived in May 1940 as they fled the German advance. The Britain they were attempting to enter was still fearful of mass unemployment and was a country of endemic antisemitism and everyday xenophobia. Still self-confident on the world stage and driven by its imperial interests, Britain was nevertheless obliged to engage with the emerging internationalist and humanitarian structures of the League of Nations. The tensions caused by these competing forces saw Britain retaining its anti-alien immigration legislation while also becoming a signatory of the League’s 1933 and 1937 Refugee Conventions and dominating many of its refugee initiatives. As the refugee crisis deepened, voluntary organisations stepped into the humanitarian vacuum, with their activity demonstrating the diversity, energy and resourcefulness of British civil society. As well as paying particular attention to the role of refugee organisations, this chapter demonstrates how the balance between state and voluntary initiatives changed over the duration of the war as government became ever-more drawn into supporting refugees who had reached Britain’s shore.

This chapter attends to the transnational and multiracial nature of modernist writing in Britain, and the critical paradigms that have only recently made this archive fully visible and audible. Black and Asian writers, publishers, editors, and broadcasters were working within and across the cultural and political networks of literary London in this period. Theatres, bookshops, meeting halls, and boarding houses provided a generative topography for various forms of cultural production. Through exploring key texts – C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Una Marson’s The Moth and the Star, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Aubrey Menen’s The Prevalence of Witches – we can chart the global perspectives and histories that took writers to London and how these were transformed and structured by their encounters in the city. These texts, in both their subject-matter and experiments with language, voice, and register, as well as genre and literary mode, are products of movement between cultures, belief systems, and literary conventions. Their diverse oeuvres suggest the versatility required of colonial writers, but also their position at the meeting point of multiple literary and political traditions.

Chapter 2 traces the ways in which Stevens explores the autonomy and social function of poetry by constructing built environments and architectural archetypes. It discusses a wide range of poems from Ideas of Order and The Man with the Blue Guitar to highlight how Stevens engages in issues of poetry’s autonomy and its social function by means of making up places for poetry. His spatial formations operate with an impulse to project an independent aesthetic territory. Far from an instance of aesthetic indifference, the impulse to demarcate a separate space is motivated by a desire to envisage new forms of engagement with the period’s unsettling cultural and sociopolitical circumstances. The chapter teases out these forms of engagement in Stevens’ approach to the cultural debates over a “usable past,” his exploration of citizen-state relationship, his treatment of the poet’s fláneuresque connection to the city, and his vision of poetry’s relation to community.