Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow
Priestley, du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness
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11 Result(s)
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Book
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Chapter
Identity: Englishness and the Reconfiguration of the Nation
‘If it were simply Old, Deep and Enduring’, says Kevin Davey, ‘Englishness, like an oak table, wouldn’t need much more than an occasional polish.’1 Lacking the solidity of an oak table, however, ‘Englishness has ...
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Memory: Sha** the Present out of the Past
It has been argued that discourses about identity, both individual and collective, are mythopoeic. This process of mythmaking also implies a relation to ‘the past’, and to memory. An exploration of Englishness...
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Chapter
The Skeleton in the Cupboard
At the beginning of World War Two, Daphne du Maurier was called upon, like many other influential authors, to ‘do her bit’ for propaganda, and she responded by writing some edifying stories for various newspap...
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Chapter
Steak-and-Kidney Pie in the Land of Cockaigne
J. B. Priestley was a highly influential middlebrow writer who captured, expressed and shaped the mood of the interwar period. Highbrow writers and critics such as Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf and the Leavi...
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Chapter
Addressing the People
Priestley was a prominent author in the 1930s, but he reached the height of his fame and popularity in wartime with a great number of domestic and overseas broadcasts. In particular, his series of ‘Postscripts...
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Chapter
From Gothic to Memodrama
Jamaica Inn is a shipwreck narrative, set at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shipwreck narrative is a popular and culturally significant genre which addresses moments of crisis when social rules and...
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Chapter
Myth: Ideologies, Symbolic Forms and the ‘Mythical Present’
Cultural stereotypes are often explained with recourse to Roland Barthes’ structuralist concept of myth as expounded in his Mythologies (1958). For Barthes, myth is a sign system that repeats the structure of lan...
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Media: Challenging Modernism — the ‘Middlebrow’ and Memodrama
Modernists, such as Wyndham Lewis or Ezra Pound, announced with iconoclast pathos that the past would disappear in a vortex and give way to the new, as expressed in such experimental movements as vorticism, futur...
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English Journeys
After looking at Priestley’s fiction, I will analyse how the symbolic form of Englishness was expressed in non-fictional work. The interwar period saw an expanding market for travel literature. As Paul Fussell...
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Dreamtime in Cornwall
Unlike J. B. Priestley, Daphne du Maurier was a ‘born novelist’. She came from a famous and well-connected family of artists, actors and writers, but finding London society uncongenial, fled to Cornwall in her...
