British Seaside Fiction

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Carolyn Oulton (Canterbury Christ Church University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.05: English Writing and Culture from the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution, 1689-1789.
Vol. editors: Paul Baines (University of Liverpool), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Pat Rogers (University of South Florida), Nicholas Seager (University of Keele)

Domains

Literature Topic

Dates

Date of occurrence c.1700

Places

United Kingdom (Location)

Across the nineteenth and into the first decades of the twentieth century, genre fiction developed that could incorporate and capitalise on shared assumptions about the behaviour of visitors to seaside resorts. For instance, Thackeray’s representation of the immorality of Regency Brighton in Vanity Fair (1848) establishes a literary tradition that transmutes into the shabby sexual convenience of Evelyn Waugh’s inter-war A Handful of Dust (1934) where characters stage, rather than perform, immoral acts in order to facilitate divorce proceedings, and also established the ground for the brutal disillusionment represented in Graham Green’s Brighton Rock (1936).

Freedom and …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

5453 words

Citation: Oulton, Carolyn. "British Seaside Fiction". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 August 2017 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19476, accessed 25 November 2024.]

Save this article