Periodisation, Eric Hayot has observed, ‘is the untheorized ground of the possibility of literary scholarship’. Few decades testify more powerfully to the claim that periodisation provides the basis for literary scholarship – by lending support to scholars’ critical habits and to tacit assumptions about literary value – than the 1930s. By turns championed and reviled for the attempt to harness art to radical (left-wing or right-wing) politics, the 1930s can seem ‘the most self-contained decade in the literary history of the last century’.