Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Gill Plain is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. She has published extensively on twentieth-century popular culture, crime fiction, gender, sexuality and the writing of the two world wars. Her previous books include John Mills and British Cinema (2006), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (2001), and Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (1996).The main attraction of Gill Plain’s book lies in its entertainingly accessible coverage of literary texts and social, intellectual issues. It is grounded in scholarly research, yet it is impressively free of scholarly jargon.
- Robert Martínez, Eastern Illinois University, Journal of British Studies 53.3
Gill Plain is a passionate, omnivorous and discerning reader, with strong instincts for what matters and sharp insights into its significance. In this rich and innovative study, she attends to verse dramas and domestic thrillers, forgotten authors and big names alike in order to redress the neglect of an explosive, melancholy and jagged decade. Her live, highly democratic sense of personal dislocation and social reverberations creates a powerful portrait of complex mentalités at a time when, as Elizabeth Bowen wrote, everyone existed ‘in a state of lucid abnormality.’
Marina Warner, University of Essex
[A] meticulous work of literary-historical scholarship.
- Claire Seiler, Dickinson College, Modernism/modernity, Volume 22, Number 4
It’s hard to imagine a better guide to the literary world of the 1940s than Gill Plain’s lucid, witty, and engaging volume. This is a book destined to send readers to the library to discover and re-discover the impressive array of texts discussed. It sheds brilliant light on how writers bore witness to the traumas and upheavals of the entire decade.
Susan R. Grayzel, University of Mississippi
‘Literature of the 1940s is a coherent and comprehensive whole about a fragmentary decade.’
- Lucy Scholes, Times Literary Supplement