Looking back on the 1930s without being anti-communist: Cornford, Orwell, Spender, Sommerfield

Abstract

The interwar literary and cultural politics of Britain were shaped crucially by the influence of the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Communist Party. Without their presence there would have been no ‘Auden generation’, no Popular Front and Britain might not even have participated in the Second World War. However, the centrality of Communism to the period’s significance raises a problem for the academic study of the literary and cultural politics of the 1930s and the Popular Front. The advent of the Cold War from the late 1940s onwards created an environment in which Communism and Communist cultural politics were coded as mistaken at best and hostile at worst. As a consequence, the study of the more neutral and abstract forms of high modernism flourished.