Books by Charles (Victoria University of Wellington) Ferrall

Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike. The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike, as well as the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.

Ferrall argues that the politics of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis were a response to the separation of art from an increasingly industrialised society. Fascism became attractive to these writers because it promised to reintegrate art into society while simultaneously guaranteeing its autonomy.