A1 Nation: Health and Environment in British Literature, 1919-1939

This thesis examines the intersections between health, environment and nationhood in the British literature of the 1920s and 1930s. It engages with authors primarily associated with popular middlebrow and regional writing in order to offer a fresh perspective on interwar literature which departs from the well-established canons of high modernism and Auden Generation poetry. The chapters that follow approach the works of six interwar authors (Winifred Holtby, A.J. Cronin, H.V. Morton, J.B. Priestley, Margiad Evans and Mary Webb) through methodologies and theories within the medical-environmental humanities and draw on the materialist history of interwar archives, essays and popular culture. In doing so, they transform popular notions of the ‘interwar’ by rethinking how nationhood and modernity were understood and imagined during a period of changing health systems, new ideas about
the outdoors and early signs of British imperial decline.