Charlotte Charteris

Offering a radical reassessment of 1930s British literature, this volume questions the temporal limits of the literary decade, and broadens the scope of queer literary studies to consider literary-historical responses to a variety of behaviours encompassed by the term ‘queer’ in its many senses. Whilst it is informed by the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, it is also profoundly concerned with what Christopher Isherwood termed ‘the market value of the Odd.’ Drawing, for its methodology, on the work of Raymond Williams, it traces the impact of the Great War on the development of language, examining the use of ten ‘keywords’ in the prose of Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Hamilton, and that of their respective literary milieux, in order to establish how queer lives and modern sub-cultural identities were forged collaboratively within the fictional realm. By utilizing contemporary perspectives on performativity in conjunction with detailed close readings it repositions these authors as self-conscious agents actively producing their own queer masculinities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression.

Drawing on Barry McCrea's work on Arthur Conan Doyle, this article challenges claims that the interwar country-house mystery arose from reactionary nostalgia for a " dead " institution. Responding not to a sudden death but to a slow decline, the form in fact facilitated the country house's reconfiguration as a biologically sterile but narratively generative queer space.

Taking as its point of departure the fundamental role of the city in American noir fiction, this article makes a case for a seminal British noir dependent upon, and best understood through, its own peculiarly British landscape: that of the seaside resort. Reconsidering a central trope of the classic noir thriller—that of the protagonist’s ill-fated relationship with his society—as a specifically pedagogical failure, it draws on direct testimony and historical accounts of the 1930s seaside in dialogue with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) and Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941), to examine the educative possibilities of a space ‘on the margin.’ Freed from the strictures of normative behaviour, the British coastal town has as great a potential for danger as for pleasure, operating as a Foucauldian heterotopia of deviation in which, for both Greene and Hamilton, homosocial mentorship might flourish, but might as easily be disrupted, leaving their protagonists stranded ‘betwixt and between’ boyhood and manhood. In privileging the homosocial bonds to which the seaside would appear to have been as conducive in the long 1930s as today, Brighton Rock and Hangover Square might thus serve as a starting point for a British noir tradition far more sexually subversive than its American cousin.

Nicholas Royle suggested in a 2004 review that literary outsider ‘Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912–64) has for too long been one of those writers more talked about than read’. Little seems to have changed in the intervening decade, the passing of the author’s centenary having been marked by several small events that contributed to what Royle termed the ‘expanding mythology’ around Maclaren-Ross, but seemingly inspiring little critical interest in his writings. This article seeks to redress the balance, utilizing the wealth of biographical material produced on Maclaren-Ross since his death in 1964, in a detailed reading of his wartime prose. Taking as its starting point the dichotomy between Maclaren-Ross’s dandified appearance and his aggressive heterosexuality, it resituates Maclaren-Ross—and, more importantly, his Second-World-War writings—within an emerging Queer Studies predicated upon the understanding that, whilst many homosexuals are, in their everyday behaviour, not queer people at all, ‘many heterosexuals are extremely queer’. In his peculiar attentiveness to clothing on as off the page, this article contends, Maclaren-Ross demonstrates an understanding, advanced for its time, of the performative power of dress, its ability to queer a society’s response to a given wearer, or group of wearers, and in so doing to betray the prejudices of that society, prejudices exacerbated by the exigencies of war.

Set in a large suburban hospital, Mary Renault’s Purposes of Love (1939) yokes illness and intimacy in ways that would prove prescient in the succeeding decade, challenging the prescribed ‘purposes’ of sexual and affective life. This chapter takes its cue from the novel, drawing on Ann Cvetkovich’s work on queer trauma to argue for a 1940s archive of feelings, a body of texts that together expose the everyday traumas of intimate life so often lost beneath a narrative of ‘national trauma’ that framed the Second World War as a wound that had to be healed in the name of unity. In representing those – children and adolescents, women, the sick and disabled – whose stories resisted this nationalist narrative, authors from Denton Welch to Henry Green, Nancy Mitford to Monica Dickens anticipated many of the findings of Mass Observation’s 1949 sex survey, offering an alternative teleology of intimate life that highlighted the rehabilitative possibilities of love.

This chapter draws on Foucault’s ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ in an exploration of Forster’s most significant and productive inter-generational relationships of the 1930s, arguing that these queer alliances shaped – and were shaped by – not only the Maurice manuscript, but an emerging queer culture that embraced the homosexual’s ‘slantwise’ position in society. As a young queer writer struggling to reconcile the demands of his personal and professional lives, seeking a mentor and yet fundamentally dissatisfied with interwar paradigms of leadership, Christopher Isherwood found in Forster not just a friend, but a master – a model of homosexual writerly life. The master-pupil dynamics that would characterise the pair’s relationship for the remainder of their lives fused the personal with the professional, establishing an ethics of equality and mutual exchange that would ultimately underpin both Forster’s novel, and the collaborative queer aesthetic that would, under Isherwood’s care, ...

Drawing on the titular implications of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (1945), this chapter argues that desire itself became inextricable from the concept of ‘pursuit’ in the postwar years, whether as a subject for scientific investigation or adolescent exploration, aas a pastime in itself or in the search for solace, as a vice to be sought out and prosecuted, or as a matter of public enquiry and private surveillance. Reading the fiction of the period not according to chronology, but in terms of this shifting emphasis, it draws on contemporary sources such as the Kinsey, Little Kinsey and Wolfenden reports to trace the impact of two world wars on a nation’s search for love.

This chapter takes as its starting point the experiences that led Raymond Williams to compile the influential Keywords (1976), tracing the impact of the Great War on the development of language – on the capacity of simple words and phrases to absorb meanings according to changes in immediate values and in types of valuation – through the use and abuse of game-play vocabulary in the formative writings of Edward Upward and Cambridge contemporary Christopher Isherwood. Examining the surviving stories, poems and dialogues that derived from the pair’s Mortmere Fantasy, together with later more overtly autobiographical works, the chapter draws on Judith Butler’s work on the performative to reposition these authors as maturing conscious agents actively producing their own identities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression. In rehearsing creatively the values that will shape their adult lives, these writers do not – as  traditional criticism would suggest – use certain words in certain ways because of who they are, they are who they are because of the ways in which they use certain words. The Mortmere writings cannot, then, simply be dismissed as self-indulgent juvenilia, but must instead be understood as complex performances, interconnected imaginative spaces within which Upward and Isherwood collaborated to test the dominant values of their day and – finding them wanting – began to establish linguistically a .set of rules with which they could themselves identify.