‘The Third England’: Suburban Fiction and Modernity, 1918–1939

Abstract

I noted in Chapter 2 a dominant feature expressed in much suburban writing: a semiotic anxiety involved in struggling to see and define the suburb and its individual inhabitants. We saw that this difficulty in seeing and reading suburban habitat means that individuals are often perceived as not being securely embedded in place, are not at home as they fail to establish and create convincing habitats or ‘life-worlds’. This failure to create a living space in the suburbs was fictionally rendered as being a problem with the material solidity of that world.