British Communism and the Politics of Literature: 1928–1939

Focusing on the literary critics and theorists associated with the Communist Party in Great Britain in the 1930s, this analysis provides a critical account of the party’s understanding of political literature and assesses the communist movement’s influence on its theorists. This argument contends that British communists—a group that is largely neglected in literary criticism—were not content simply to restate Soviet ideas about literature but developed them in innovative and unorthodox ways.