The First World War and English Culture

A War Imagined

It is cultural history of a sweeping order... which can be savoured for its profusion of exhibits as well as for its ambitious thesis... A teeming book full of learning and humanity.

Makes tremendous sense... The wholly coherent effect of Hynes's study is all the more notable for the disintegrated nature of his material... A greatly rewarding study of how culture was dumbfounded.

Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature as Princeton University. Together with his earlier works- The Edwardian Turn of Mind and The Auden Generation- A War Imagined forms an important continuous study of the relationship between literature, the arts and th4e events of history during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time. England after the war was a different place; the arts were different; history was different; sex, society, class were all different. 
 
Samuel Hynes examines the process of that transformation. He explores a vast cultural mosaic comprising novels and poetry, music and theatre, journalism, paintings, films, parliamentary debates, public monuments, sartorial fashions, personal diaries and letters. 
 
Told in rich detail, this penetrating account shatters much of the received wisdom about the First World War. It shows how English culture adapted itself to the needs of killing, how our stereotypes of the war gradually took shape and how the nations thought and imagination were profoundly and irretrievably changed.

The Auden Generation

About feelings, fog and forebodings, about the sense of a birth of good against gathering odds, The Auden Generation is wonderfully accurate, never smart or superficial and always sympathetic. A good and necessary book.

His extremely lucid, readable and intelligent study of the literary history of England in the Thirties greatly enlarges the reader's view of the generation.

Stimulating and authentic... Hynes's judicious choice of example and avoidance of muddying inclusivity, his ability to make critical connections and his clarity of argument, all these qualities give his book unity, give it indeed its definitive scope.

Samuel Hynes was born in Chicago in 1924 and was educated at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. He has taught at Swarthmore College, Northwestern University. From 1943 to 1946, and again in 1952-3, he served as a pilot in the United States Marine Corps. His books include The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry, Edwardian Occasions and Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator. 
 
The Auden Generation is the second volume of Samuel Hynes's trilogy of cultural histories covering the relationship between literature, theatre and public events during the first four decades of the twentieth century. The others - The Edwardian Turn of Mind and A War Imagined - are also published by Pimlico.

This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time passing and an end approaching gave a special quality to the Thirties. The public world pressed insistently on the private world. For those who came of literary age - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Graham Greene, Isherwood and Orwell among them - writing became a form of action. In the process a generation discovered itself and found its own expression.

Samuel Hynes

The Edwardian Turn of Mind brilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors. His book is a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporary England was made.

Samuel Hynes

Edwardian Turn Of Mind

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