In his remarks to the Congress of American Writers in 1937, Ernest Hemingway addressed the audience with the bold declaration that ‘There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. […] [F]ascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism.’ Fighting fascism in the 1930s, for many of the world’s most influential writers, was not simply a political or ideological battle – it was a symbolic struggle for integrity, freedom, and liberty under threat of intellectual enslavement. Hemingway was not alone in believing that writers were obliged to be ‘good’ through an active critique of fascist ideologies.

The 1930s was a decade energised by crisis and hope. It ended badly on many fronts, including (seemingly) that of literature. Robert Hewison labels the years 1939 and 1940 the ‘grand slaughter of magazines’, noting that The Cornhill Magazine, Criterion, New Verse, Welsh Review, Voice of Scotland, and a range of other journals ‘all fell silent’. John Lehmann, a leading young periodical editor, recalled how ‘In the Christmas [1939] Number I announced the death of New Writing’, an innovative journal he had launched in 1936.

In 1938, Stephen Spender imagined a ‘revolution in the ideas of drama’, a theatre that could both deal with the complex socio-politics of the decade and take on new aesthetic challenges. The trouble, of course, was what this drama might look like in practice. In fact, in addressing the multifarious artistic and political disputes of this period, drama in the 1930s resists easy critical definition, residing in a liminal sense betwixt and between positions, terminology, and aesthetics. It can be read as highbrow, lowbrow, or middlebrow, with many individual examples flitting between these permeable categories.

In 1940, George Orwell wrote a profile of the novelist Henry Miller, praising him as a prose-stylist and psychologist of the ‘ordinary man’, praising him above all as a ‘creative writer’ in what has ceased to be ‘a writer’s world’. For ‘what is quite obviously happening’, Orwell declared, ‘is the break-up of laissez faire capitalism’, ‘the destruction of liberalism’ and of ‘literature as we know it’. In this end-times scenario, Miller is shown clinging to the ‘melting iceberg’ of liberal humanism, elaborating his own ‘subjective truth’ in his own inimitable style, indifferent to the world. As a foil, Orwell introduces the communist ‘propagandists’ and ‘cocksure partisans’ of the next generation.

The outpouring of novels about regional and rural Britain that peaked in the 1930s had as its context a more broadly social cult of the countryside that generated all kinds of extravagant proclamations about the powers of rural life to define an urban nation and global empire. Among the most notorious of these statements was Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s toast to members of the Royal Society of St George, a group devoted to advancing English patriotism, at their annual meeting at London’s grand Hotel Cecil on 6 May 1924.

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’.

Throughout the 1930s, old and new forms of media continued to uphold the centrality of imperialism in British nationalism. Adventure stories featuring imperial benevolence and derring-do written in the previous century by Henry Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and G. A. Henty remained popular cultural touchstones. Popular radio programmes such as the BBC’s Empire Day and Christmas broadcasts reflected a view of the Empire ‘as a topic of central concern to national life, one which could be turned to nationalist, moral, and quasi-religious ends’.

To be classified as ‘popular’ or ‘middlebrow’ is to be damned with imprecise and, often, faint praise. This is particularly true in the 1930s when questions of literary ‘taste’ and ‘value’ increasingly shifted the parameters of critical reception in Britain by drawing distinctions between the popular and highbrow while airing the notion of the ‘middlebrow’ as a third classification. These categorisations accelerated debates about the rise in commercial writing in the period while lamenting the wider effects of mass culture on society. Fundamentally, this discussion became a struggle over ideas of cultural and intellectual authority that broadly coincided with a proliferation of novels written predominantly for a wide readership, particularly of middle-class women, under the classification ‘middlebrow’, as Nicola Humble’s groundbreaking study The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s–1950s establishes.

The chapter begins with a survey of musical comedy of the 1890s and early twentieth century. A brief account of Edward German and his operettas follows. Noël Coward established himself as a British operetta composer with Bitter Sweet in 1929. However, the person who did most to keep English operetta alive in the 1930s was the Welsh composer Ivor Novello (1893–1951). He gained a considerable amount of experience both as a composer for the stage and as an actor before completing his first operetta, Glamorous Night, in 1935. This chapter assesses Novello’s achievements, musical and dramatic, and investigates the critical reception of his operettas. It places him in the context of what came before (Fraser-Simson, Montague Phillips, Noël Coward) and what came after (Vivian Ellis, Julian Slade, Sandy Wilson).

National Socialism is said to have ended the success story of operetta art: the death of the genre may be situated between 1933 and 1945, caused by Nazi purges. This chapter takes a closer look at operetta during the Nazi regime, dealing with three different approaches. First, I sketch the consequences for operetta of the Nazi ideology of denial (Verweigerungsideologie). Operetta stood against every Nazi theory of ‘German art’ for two main reasons: its dazzling aesthetics and artists, mostly defamed for being Jewish. Second, the chapter focusses on the aim to conceive an original type of German operetta. The examples of Heinrich Strecker’s chauvinistic Ännchen of Tharau (1933) and Hermann Hermecke’s and Arno Vetterling’s propaganda operetta The Dorothee (1936) reveal that attempts to reinvent the genre were dominated less by instructions from potentates than by artists who wanted to support the regime. Third, the chapter examines theatre practice, exemplified by Munich’s Gärtnerplatz Theatre between 1938–44. Even in these years, theatres had to deal with an audience that still demanded the roaring, non-German genre tradition. Operetta offers a glimpse into quotidian culture under the dictatorship, where the ‘death’ of the genre was not as widespread as stated.

When Franz Lehár’s Viennese operetta The Merry Widow arrived London in 1907, it was not only one of the most remarkable West End hits but also the beginning of a new age of global entertainment. The reception took place worldwide and overcame national traditions to establish a new international show business in the early twentieth century. In consequence a cross-cultural exchange emerged confirming the ‘birth of the modern world’ at that time. Along with Lehár, a new generation of composers propagated the new style on the Continent, for example, Oscar Straus, Leo Fall and Emmerich Kálmán. In the decade before World War I, Viennese operettas dominated the repertory of the Western world. Balancing the ‘local’ and ‘global’ was an important aspect of their achievement, so it was no coincidence that all those composers originated from the Habsburg Empire. Thus, Lehár grew up as a son of a Czech-born, German-speaking military bandmaster and of a Hungarian mother, spending his childhood in seven different cities of Austria-Hungary. Life was similar for Leo Fall, who furthermore was Jewish like Oscar Straus, and Emmerich Kálmán. But they all worked in Vienna, the experimental laboratory for the arts generally and popular music especially.