Writing the 1926 General Strike

Abstract

Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike. The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike, as well as the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.

“It’s the mass that counts”: Striking energies in working-class fiction

“…Against the packed mass of men of the platform behind her, she stood like a living red flag, the spirit of revolution" (Wilkinson 2004, 48). As Ferrall and McNeill (2015) observe of this passage, "the excitement of a General Strike leading to areas being 'run by sheer soviets' expresses itself here as a conflation of mass action with personal appeal -Joan is a flag, a rallying point, a source of energy and action" (160). Joan emerges as the embodiment of her own understanding of the situation inaugurated by the strike.…”

Introduction: The Interwar Woman Writer: Politics and Aesthetics

“…What has looked to us like an organizational turn in modernist studies in recent years comes into play here too, and we are inspired by new research focusing on the political activism and social commitments of writers working in the interwar period. So far the emphasis has tended to fall on male writers of the left or discussion geared towards definitional questions (see Kohlmann 2014;Ferrall and McNeill 2015;Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015). The symposium on which this collection is based was partly motivated by our mutual concern that women writers' political practice in their lives and their contribution to political debates in their writing not be overlooked.…”