The decades between two world wars were characterised by political conflict, economic instability and intellectual allegiances to both communism and fascism. Aesthetically, the continuous influence of modernism as well as traditional forms like the domestic novel but also more direct responses to the changing political climate shaped the literary landscape . In this reading-intensive course we will study a number of these literary texts and their contexts, including E. Waugh's Vile Bodies, C. Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, N. Mitford's Wigs on the Green, J. Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, as well as texts by Virginia Woolf.