Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain

Abstract

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain looks at the impact of aviation in Britain and beyond through the 1920s and 1930s. This book considers how in this period flying went from a weapon of war to an extensive industry that included civilian air travel, air mail delivery, flying shows and campaigns to create ‘airmindedness’. Essays look at these developments through the work of writers, filmmakers and flyers and examines the airminded modernism that marked this radical period. Its fourteen chapters include studies of texts by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, W.H. Auden, T.H. White and John Masefield; accounts of the annual RAF Display at Hendon and the Schneider Trophy; and the achievements of celebrity flyers such as Amy Johnson. This collection provides a fresh perspective on the interwar period by bringing analysis of aviation and airmindedness to the study of British literature, history, modernism, mobilities and the history of technology and transportation. Michael McCluskey is Lecturer in the CAS Writing Program at Boston University, USA. He was previously Lecturer in English at the University of York, UK, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London, UK, and a Research Fellow at metaLAB (at) Harvard, USA. He is working on a monograph on 1930s British documentary. Luke Seaber is Tutor in Modern European Culture on the Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate for the Humanities at University College London, UK. He is author of G.K. Chesterton’s Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony (2012) and Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). He has published various articles and chapters on British literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.