Making it new? Literature of the Twenties Special

Available for over a year

Johny Pitts explores the books of the 1920s with Alison McLeod, Bill Goldstein, James Clammer and Jo Hamya - asking why the era is so relevant today and how writers are responding to uncannily similar crises. After the devastation of the First World War, a global flu pandemic, economic instability and civil unrest, many writers saw an opportunity to express their disillusionment with society’s issues such as women’s rights, class and racism. Often referred to as the Roaring Twenties. or the Jazz Age, it was also a time of sexual liberation and the pursuit of pleasure has often been perceived (often wrongly) as it’s dominating theme So with many parallels now, what will be the effect on fiction of the next decade? Will we see a period of creative expression and freedom to rival DH Lawrence, Woolf, Fitzgerald and Joyce – and what can reading of those novels reveal to us about what might happen next? Presenter: Johny Pitts Producer: Ciaran Bermingham Book List Tenderness by Alison MacLeod The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein Insignificance by James Clammer Three Rooms by Jo Hamya Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence The Rainbow by DH Lawrence The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Banjo by Claude McKay Ulysses by James Joyce A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf Orlando by Virginia Woolf The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters