A1 Nation: Health, the Body and Interwar Literature

'A1 Nation' is a critical intervention into a rich but somewhat limited conversation on British interwar literature. More specifically, my intervention adopts a Foucauldian and biopolitical framework in order to question whether reigning mythologies of the interwar period are necessarily undermined by research into the relationship between medical science and literature in this period. By exploring the numerous ways in which the vocabulary of health, disease and biology shaped not just political ideology, but literary form itself, my research aims to unpack the complex, and at times contradictory, ways in which art and science in interwar Britain were synthesised. Drawing on historical research into British medical culture (including health organisations such as New Health, the eugenics movement and the Sunlight League), 'A1 Nation' argues that the culmination of public discourse on health in this period simultaneously nourished conservative anxieties about the decline of Western civilisation along with a radical vocabulary of social decay and consequent revolution. But despite differences in political opinion, interwar literature is unified in its heightened investment in the healthiness of the individual body and by extension, the body politic. Ultimately, my research argues that the medical sciences contributed to new artistic sensibilities specific to British interwar literature, offering not just a literary vocabulary but new ways of seeing, interpreting and artistically rendering the world.