Book News: Opinion Polls in Interwar British Literature

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn

BY MEGAN FARAGHER 

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780192898975

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/public-opinion-polling-in-mid-century-british-literature-9780192898975?cc=us&lang=en&#

Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fuelled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature traces this most crucial period of group psychology's evolution--the mid-century--when "psychography," a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a fresh explanation for the new "material" turn so often associated with interwar writing.

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• Provides a cultural genealogy of public opinion polling in canonical and non-canonical literary works from the 1920s to the 1940s
• Demonstrates the propensity for sociologically inflected literature to flatten distinctions between high and low cultures by including experimental fiction, science fiction, detective fiction, and war fiction
• Presents the first history of polling as a cultural phenomenon as well as an institutionalized practice, which builds on growing interest in the complex relationship between modernism and institutionalism
• Adds to scholarly discussions of aesthetic transformation in the interwar period by introducing group psychology as a dominant cultural influence
• Integrates archival research from Home Intelligence Reports, Mass Observation Surveys, Wartime Social Survey Research, and BBC Listener Research Reports
• Provides interdisciplinary avenues for understanding changing cultural representations of psychological interiority that extend beyond literary modernism

Megan Faragher is an associate professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus. She received her PhD in English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2012, where she specialized in twentieth-century English and Irish literature. She joined Wright State University Lake Campus in 2013 after completing a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at East Tennessee State University. Her research and teaching interests center on British literature between the world wars, and the intersection between technology, information, and culture.