This advanced option module explores cultural life in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. From the popular fiction, politicised poetry and documentary film movement of the 1930s, to the public sculpture, modernist design and kitchen-sink dramas of the 1950s, we will examine the work of artists, musicians and writers, as well as their audiences, reception and context. The nature and importance of ‘culture’ itself was much discussed in this period. Definitions of lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow marked distinctions in the consumption of the arts, reflecting and defining divisions within the society by class, education and gender. However the arts were also credited with the potential to unify the nation, contributing to morale in wartime and to the postwar reconstruction. Through the 1940s, the state began to intervene in the shaping and encouragement of national culture, taking up its role as patron of the arts. The lectures and key readings in the course examine these changing parameters, as well as the contemporary debates about culture and its relationship to national identity. The seminars allow us to engage with primary sources from a range of different types of literature, visual art, music, film and design, developing skills of source analysis and exploring the complex ways in which these art forms both reflected and shaped identities and social and political experiences.

• Demonstrate detailed knowledge of the key themes and developments in British cultural life during the period;
• Demonstrate an understanding of relevant historical, historiographical and critical contexts;
• Analyse the module themes and primary sources in relation to these scholarly contexts;
• Demonstrate an understanding of, and confidence in interpreting the primary sources;
• Evaluate the relative merits of different historical interpretations of the primary sources material and the key themes of the module;
• Formulate and justify independent arguments and conclusions about the themes arising in the module;
• Present arguments clearly and concisely in written and oral forms.

A range of teaching methods will be used in each of the sessions of the course, comprising a combination of lectures, seminar discussion of major issues and workshops for the study of primary source material.

Lectures:

The aim of the lectures is to provide a brief introduction to a particular topic, establishing the salient features of major course themes, identifying key issues and providing historiographical guidance. The lectures aim to provide a basic framework for understanding and should be thought of as useful starting points for further discussion and individual study. Where appropriate, handouts and other materials may be distributed to reinforce the material discussed.

Seminars and Source Workshops:

The primary aim of the sessions will be to generate debate and discussion amongst course participants, focused in particular on primary source material. Seminars and source workshops for each of the course topics will provide an opportunity for students:

1. to discuss topics or issues introduced by the lectures, or
2. to discuss related themes, perhaps not directly addressed by the lectures, but drawing on ideas culled from those lectures, and
3. to analyse different types of primary sources available, discussing the principal ways in which they can be used by historians.

Seminars and source workshops will provide the student with guidance on how to critically approach the various types of primary source material. Preparation for seminars and workshops will focus on specific items from the sources and related background reading, with students preparing answers to questions provided for each session. Both seminars and source workshops will provide an opportunity to discuss and debate the issues with fellow students. Classes will be divided into smaller groups for discussion purposes, with the results presented as part of an overall class debate at the end of the session.

While studying this course, students will develop valuable critical reading and writing skills, analysing and engaging with diverse primary sources in order to contribute to historical discussions and debates. They will engage with and evaluate broad theoretical arguments and apply them to their own investigations. They will communicate ideas and arguments in a variety of forms, including oral presentations, group work, and in written form. They will learn to weigh up different interpretations and ideas, defending and, if need be, modifying their positions in both written and oral forms, and offering reasoned conclusions to arguments.

Essay 1 will contribute 20% of the final mark for the module. It is designed to give students the opportunity to critically engage with and analyse a primary source on the topic they are studying. It must be no longer than 1,000 words (excluding appendices, references, and bibliography). Students will be expected to choose a primary source, place it in its historical and historiographical context, consider its methodological uses and limitations, and to suggest the broader relevance of the source to historians. Students will be assessed on their understanding of the source chosen and their ability to critically engage with and analyse its broader uses and limitations.

Essay 2 will contribute 30% of the final mark for the module. It is designed to give students the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to review evidence, draw appropriate conclusions from it and employ the formal conventions of scholarly presentation. It must be no longer than 2,000 words (excluding appendices, references, and bibliography). Students will be expected to offer a scholarly argument, considering interpretations and evidence before offering a reasoned conclusion.

The Examination will take place during the second assessment period [May/June] and will consist of an unseen two hour paper that will contribute the remaining 50% of the final mark for this module. There will be ten questions provided and students must write 2 answers in total.

Lecture plan:

• Culture and the mass society
• Highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow
• Literature, libraries and the commercial market
• The challenge of Americanisation
• Jazz, dance, records and the wireless
• Modern art after Bloomsbury
• The documentary movement
• Art and internationalism
• Spain and the poets
• Neo-romanticism and national identity
• The BBC
• Film and propaganda
• War art
• Design and public taste
• The state as patron: the creation of the Arts Council
• Class and the Uses of Literacy
• Modernist landscapes
• Institutions and education: fostering a national culture?

Seminar/source workshop themes:

• Literature of the depression
• British artists and Modernism
• The Auden generation: art as politics
• Women’s books? Romance, class and gender
• ‘Snobbery with violence’: the 1930s crime wave
• George Orwell’s essays
• Battle of the book clubs
• Penguin: a paperback revolution
• T.S.Eliot, culture, and civilisation
• Film in the Second World War
• Artists on the home front
• The Festival of Britain, 1951
• Hepworth and Moore: public sculpture
• Ealing and the postwar British film industry
• Cold War culture
• Angry Young Men
• Mid-century modernity: design in the 1950s
• Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart: class and culture

Please see Background reading for indicitive list

Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English writers, artists and the imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (2010)

John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992)

Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures (1998)

Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2010)

Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: the dangerous flood of history (1996)

Lara Feigel, The Love Charm of Bombs: restless lives in the Second World War (2013)

Peter Stansky, London’s Burning: life, death and art in the Second World War (1994)

Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, Best of British: cinema and society from 1930 to the present (1999)

Robert Hewison, Culture and Consensus: England, art and politics since 1940 (1995)

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957)

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958)