Novelists Against Social Change Conservative Popular Fiction, 1920-1960

Novelists Against Social Change shows how the writing of the best-selling novelists John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell expressed their conservative fears and anxieties by politicizing their fiction and characters, from 1920 to 1960. Buchan's focus on national and European politics of the 1920s and 30s was embedded in his trademark adventure fiction for Establishment heroes. Yates's stylistic exuberance decorated his fierce defence of retrogressive social codes with an almost modernist attention to language. Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire social comedies were an elegy to Victorian values and a passionate defence of upper-class civilization as she conceived it. Resisting the threat of change in social class, political action, the freedom of women, and professionalization produced some of their strongest works. This book pays particular attention to Buchan's novels Huntingtower, Castle Gay and A Prince of the Captivity, to Yates's 'Berry' novels and short stories and his thrillers, and Thirkell's wartime and postwar fiction.

Kate Macdonald is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. She teaches British literature and literary history, and researches twentieth-century British book culture, publishing history and popular reading, on which she has published several books, including The Masculine Middlebrow 1880-1950 (2011) and Transitions in Middlebrow Writing 1880-1930 (2015). She is the leading scholarly authority on John Buchan, and is series editor of the monograph series Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace.

1. Introduction: Politics and Pleasure in Language
2. From Communism to the Wall Street Crash: Buchan in the 1920s
3. Ex-officers and Gentlemen: Yates in the 1920s
4. Political Uncertainty: Buchan in the 1930s
5. Novels of Instruction: Thirkell in the 1930s
6. Aggressive Reactions: Yates in the 1930s and 1940s
7. Thirkell in Wartime, 1940-45
8. Rewriting History: Yates and Thirkell, 1945-1960
9. Conclusion
Endnotes
Appendix 1: List of works by John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell
Works cited
Index