Seminar 4
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To what extent did inter-war Britain see the emergence of a 'common culture'?
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Was the working class a united and monolithic grouping? To what extent was it internally stratified by age, gender, and hierachies of status?
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To what extent was the middle class united by shared attitudes, practices and living conditions, and who did they define themselves against?
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How fundamental was the divide between the intellectuals and the masses in early twentieth-century Britain?
Seminar Reading
Joanne Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1880-1960 (1994)
Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (1998)
Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (1971)
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
K. McClelland & T. Jeffrey, 'A World Fit to Live In: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes, 1918-1939' in J. Curran, A. Smith & P. Wingate (eds.), Impacts and Influences: Essays in Media Power in the Twentieth Century (1987), 27-52.
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992)
Further Reading
J. Baxendale & C. Pawling (eds.), Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (1996)
John Benson, the Rise of a Consumer Society (1993)
Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain (2004)Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1880-1960 (1994)
Asa Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years (1985)
Asa Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless (1965)
David Cannadine, Class in Britain (1998)
* John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992), pp. …
Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006)
Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of a Consumer Society (1993)
James Curran & Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (1997)
H. Jennings & W. Gill, Broadcasting and Everyday Life (1939)
N. Joicey, ‘A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books, 1935-1951’, 20th Century British History, 4 (1993), 25-56
* D. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communications and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (1988)
J. McAleer, ‘Scenes from Love and Marriage: Mills and Boon and the Popular Publishing Industry in Britain, 1908-1950’, Twentieth Century British History, 1 (1990), 264-88
K. McClelland & T. Jeffrey, ‘A World Fit to Live In: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes, 1918-1939’, in J. Curran, A. Smith & P. Wingate (eds.), Impacts and Influences: Essays in Media Power in the Twentieth Century (1987), 27-52* Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (1998)
Sian Nicholas, ‘”Sly Demagogues” and Wartime Radio: J.B. Priestley and the BBC, 1939-1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 6 (1995)
Sian Nicholas, ‘The Construction of a National Identity: Stanley Baldwin, ‘Englishness’ and the Mass Media in Inter-War Britain’, in Martin Francis & Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (eds.), The Conservatives and British Society, 1880-1990 (1996), pp. 127-146
Sian Nicholas, ‘The People’s Radio: The BBC and its Audience, 1939-45’, in Nick Hayes & Jeff Hill (eds.), Millions Like Us: British Culture in the Second World War, 62-92
Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler (eds.), After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (1994)
J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939 (1984)
* Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001)
Dave Russell, ‘Sport and Identity: The Case of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, 1890-1939’, 20th Century British History, 7 (1996), 206-30
Michael Saler, ‘”Clap if you Believe in Sherlock Holmes”: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890-1940’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 599-622
Michael Saler, ‘Making it New: Visual Modernism and the “Myth of the North” in Interwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998), 419-40Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (1999)
Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting. Volume One, 1922-1939: Serving the Nation (1991)
Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (2002)
Selina Todd, ‘Flappers and Factory Lads: Youth and Youth Culture in Interwar Britain’, History Compass, 4/4 (2006), 715-30