Re-Imagining the Jewelled Isle: England and Cross-Media Projects in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

My dissertation argues British writers in the 1930s and 1940s all explored the political efficacy of other media in order to create new definitions of Englishness. It aims both to shed light on the relationship between different media and to explore the new definitions of English culture that arise from their self-conscious cross-media experimentation.

This study, divided into two parts, examines 1) literary responses to non-literary media, such as photography, film, and radio; and 2) the way these cross-media experiments participated in a broader cultural project of defining what it meant to be English in the interwar years and the immediate postwar aftermath. The works of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, W. H. Auden, and Graham Greene reveal how they thought about writing as a medium in terms of the unique visuality or aurality of radio, photography, and film. Responding to questions about England’s post-imperial status, these writers turned to notions of perception that other media provoked in order to seek new ways to define the nation, whether as a state, community, or organic whole.