Erica Delsandro: “A Ninetyish Feeling: Decadence, Dandies and Queer History in the 1930s” – March 5, 2009
Responding to scholars whose work has illuminated the distinctiveness of the 1930s in Britain, this project argues that more than seeking distinction, the canonical writers of the thirties – the self-identified “Younger Generation” – were profoundly concerned with the task of historicizing their decade and their own position within a national historiography from which they felt the Great War had excluded them. Inheritors of British cultural privilege but symbolically disenfranchised from a national, masculine identity inextricably linked to war, these writers address the problem of a national story dominated by imperial and military mythologies.