Edinburgh Napier University

  This collection seeks an alternative history of British literature from 1890 to 1945; it has no essays on canonical British literary modernists. Instead, contributors reflect through the lens of less familiar authors, othered by genre, gender, faith and form, on the processes by which canonicity happens. Scrutinizing over 30 noncanonical writers, this book deliberately looks away from the British modernist canon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, bringing into sharp relief the problematic nature of discussions about literary merit. We return to the scene of the modern to examine its pluralities, recalling that authors were consciously in active dialogue with contemporary literature and literary tradition, whether that was to accept or reject it.

In the introduction the editors parse the relationship between the popular, the peripheral, the ephemeral and the canon, looking back at the construction of literary traditions and challenges to them. The four sections of the book deal with: middlebrow and popular writing; art and literature; feminism and its challenges; and science and belief. Authors engage with politics, nation and identity in bestsellers, work straddling art and literature, the complex relationships between conservatism and progressive movements such as suffragism, and the tension between science and faith.

The diverse range of papers in this collection attests to the rich variety of noncanonical writing produced by British writers in the early twentieth century. Examining the period’s issues through less familiar and even forgotten authors brings to bear valuable new perspectives on the cultural history of this period.