On first glance, British literature of the 1930s offers a natural subject for a dedicated Cambridge Companion. As critics have often remarked, few other decades seem to claim such a compelling status as a distinct literary-historical era, with a series of political events, aesthetic debates, and emerging literary networks providing an identity that goes beyond the normal convenience of decade-based periodisation and into ‘one of literary history’s most stable and flourishing concepts’. With just a slight nudging of the boundaries, the 1930s is often characterised as running from 1929 until 1939, from the stock market crash of 1929 until the arrival of the Second World War, with September 1939 marking an end to the epoch as the world entered a cataclysmic new phase.