| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines how Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison and
Rebecca West appropriated the political ideas of the interwar period into their fiction
and sought to transform abstract ideals into values with which to judge and improve
social life. For all four writers, this pursuit takes the form of showing the complex
relations between theory and practice as experienced by particular individuals. My
premise here is the idea that political ideals are based upon the moral principles used by
persons to guide their conduct in the pursuit of individual and collective happiness.
Chapter One discusses the socialist concepts of loyalty, equality and fraternity as
the values upon which the good society should be constructed and the self-appointed
role of writers as public intellectuals whose task was to counteract political apathy and
encourage the practice of active citizenship. Chapter Two examines Holtby's Eutychus
or the Future of the Pulpit, Jameson's No Time Like the Present and Rebecca West's
"The Strange Necessity" to demonstrate how literature was intended as a tool in the
defence against the atomisation effected by the impact of modern life on culture, and a
bulwark against the concomitant subjectivism which resulted from the extensive retreat
into private life. Chapters Three and Four examine the practice of politics itself, with
particular emphasis on the social bonds proposed to replace the instrumentality of
interpersonal relationships in capitalist societies. The texts examined are Mitchison's
We Have Been Warned, Holtby's South Riding, Jameson's In the Second Year and
Mirror in Darkness, as well as West's Harriet Hume. Chapter Five focuses on Jameson's
That Was Yesterday and West's The Thinking Reed and discusses the difficulties faced
by women unable to negotiate the boundaries between the domestic and the public
sphere of sociability as a result of the irreconciliability of self-determination and social
demands. | en_US |
