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'Priestley's England' explores the cultural, literary and political history of 20th-century Britain through the radical critique offered by one of its most popular writers, J.B. Priestley. Its wide-ranging themes include 'Englishness', literary culture and its values, 'Americanisation' and mass culture.

Priestley’s England is the first full-length academic study of J B Priestley - novelist, playwright, screen-writer, journalist and broadcaster, political activist, public intellectual and popular entertainer, one of the makers of twentieth-century Britain, and one of its sharpest critics. From his scathing analysis of a slump-stricken nation in the best-selling English Journey, to his popular wartime broadcasts which paved the way to 1945 and the welfare state, his post-war critique of ‘Admass’ and the Cold War (he was a co-founder of CND), and his continual engagement with the question of ‘Englishness’, Priestley addressed the key issues of the century from a radical standpoint in fiction, journalism and plays which appealed to a wide audience and made him one of the most successful writers of his day, in a career which spanned the 1920s and the 1980s. Priestley’s England explores the cultural, literary and political history of twentieth-century Britain through the themes which preoccupied Priestley throughout his life: competing versions of Englishness; tradition, modernity, and the decline of industrial England; ‘Americanisation’, mass culture and ‘Admass’; cultural values and ‘broadbrow’ culture; consumerism and the decay of the public sphere; the loss of spirituality and community in ‘the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century’. It argues that Priestley has been unjustly neglected for too long: we have a great deal to learn both from this extraordinary, multi-faceted man, and from the English radical tradition he represented. This book will appeal to all those interested in the culture and politics of twentieth-century Britain, in the continuing debates over ‘Englishness’ to which Priestley made such a key contribution, and in the life and work of one of the most remarkable and popular writers of the past century.Priestley’s England explores the cultural, literary and political history of twentieth-century Britain through the radical critique offered by one of its most popular writers, J B Priestley. Its wide-ranging themes include ‘Englishness’, literary culture and its values, ‘Americanisation’ and mass culture.

In the interwar period, seaside holidays had become accessible to more people in the United Kingdom than ever before. It was not least the unapologetic hedonism of the working classes that gave places like Blackpool and Scarborough their vibrant energy. However, a notable number of English travelogues in the 1930s depict seaside resorts as overcrowded, vulgar, debilitating, and in fact un-English. During the years in which the UK faced the rising threat of fascism, the seaside became a site where ideas of Englishness, popular culture, and masculinity came under scrutiny. This paper explores these ambivalent constructions of the English seaside resort, from J. B. Priestley’s English Journey to the collection Beside the Seaside, in which women authors, including Yvonne Cloud and Kate O’Brian, celebrate the seaside as a catalyst of female agency. (VR)

When, in the early twentieth century, British middle-class writers went on a tour in search of their country, travel writing not only saw the re-emergence of the home tour, but also the increasing appearance of the motorcar on British roads. With the travelogue playing the role of a discursive arena in which debates about automobility were visualized, the article argues that, as they went “in search of England,” writers like Henry Vollam Morton and J. B. Priestley not only took part in the ideological framing of motoring as a social practice, but also contributed to a change in the perception of accessing a seemingly remote English countryside. By looking at a number of contemporary British travelogues, the analysis traces the strategies of how the driving subjects staged their surroundings, and follows the authors' changing attitudes toward the cultural habit of traveling: instead of highlighting the seemingly static nature of the meaning of space, the travelogues render motoring a dynamic and procedural spatial practice, thus influencing notions of nature, progress, and tradition.

By 1963, it had been more than three decades since Priestley published The Good Companions (1929), the first of many best-selling books to attain the runaway popularity that prompted Virginia Woolf to class him as a mere \"tradesman of letters\" and to write the essay \"Middlebrow\" (1932) in reaction against what he represented.3 By 1963, his English Journey (1934)-an inspiration, some say, for George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)-had long since made him a beloved little-Englander, and his \"time plays,\" often the talk of the West End, even three at a time in 1937, had been some of the nation's most popular entertainments. Woolf as well as a host of modernist writers sought to make such a difference to time; temporal redemption achieved through aesthetic form was integral to modernist invention.\\n So visually experimental and recklessly disturbing that Newsweek's David Ansen predicted it would be \"the most walked-out-of movie of 2003,\" Irreversible is worlds away from Priestley's little England, and therefore perhaps the most striking evidence that Priestley's campaign represents a larger endeavor.43 Irreversible proceeds in reverse order, beginning with mayhem in a gay club and proceeding through scenes that show the cause of it: first, a scene in which we see a that a woman has been brutally raped; next, the scene of the rape itself, surely the most horrific scene of violence in contemporary film, and which made Irreversible such a film to walk out of.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Sarah Badel star in J.B. Priestley’s classic play. A tragic event causes guests at a dinner party to ruminate on honesty, trust and dark secrets.

Just as the imminence of the Second World War overshadowed the first production of J. B. Priestley's ‘modern morality play’, Johnson Over Jordan, in 1939, so did the disaster of 9/11 its only major revival, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2001. Both productions boasted a major actor – respectively Ralph Richardson and Patrick Stewart – in the title role of a play which continued Priestley's search to find a theatrical style for his own metaphysical enquiries into the nature of time and the boundaries of human mortality. In this article, Alan W. Friedman sets the play in the context of western attitudes towards death and the nature of an afterworld, and relates these to Johnson's own journey after his funeral through rewindings of his past life towards some sort of reconciliation with its ending. Alan W. Friedman is Thaman Professor of English in the University of Texas, Austin, and has also taught at universities in England, Ireland, and France. He has published numerous articles and books, the latter including Multivalence: the Moral Quality of Form in the Modern Novel (Louisiana State UP, 1978), William Faulkner (Frederick Ungar, 1984), Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise (Cambridge UP, 1995), and (edited with Charles Rossman and Dina Sherzer) Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett (Pennsylvania State UP, 1987).

Henthorne notes that book publishing was alone free enough from government minders to offer dissent from the conventional view of British war aims. J. B. Priestley used his wartime novels to assert that workers did not fight for love of country or to preserve the English way of life, but instead to change the social order, to transform England into a socialist state.

Taking J. B. Priestley's 1933 psychological drawing-room comedy, \"Dangerous Corner,\" which is very English, David Mamet, the playwright and director, who is very American, has conceived his own distinctive variation, also called \"Dangerous Corner.\" The result of this collaboration across sea and time is something quite special and unexpected. It's both a rewarding theater exercise and a fascinating example of drama deconstruction: aware, appreciative and rock hard. Though Mr. Mamet changes some phrases (without losing the English tone), his version of \"Dangerous Corner,\" which is set in the 1930's, like the original, is a demonstration of wizardly line-by-line editing. In this fashion he reduces Priestley's three-act play, running (I would estimate) something over two hours, to two acts (one intermission) that breeze by in 90 minutes. The biggest surprise: Utilizing the drastically pared-down Priestley language, he has created a work that sounds hauntingly like an original Mamet. A suggestion: When you go to \"Dangerous Corner,\" read the program when you sit down. It identifies the characters and their relation to one another. In editing Priestley, Mr. Mamet has cut out some of this stuff, which, after all, is information you'll eventually pick up anyway. Yet it does help to know beforehand. Unlike Mr. Daldry's large-scale, apocalyptic vision of \"An Inspector Calls,\" Mr. Mamet's production finds the meaning of \"Dangerous Corner\" not by broadening its context, but by stripping the play down to its bare bones. Very different approaches, each stunningly theatrical.