Richly informative about a host of writers from Auden to Priestley, and theoretically informed, this wide-ranging new study demonstrates that the 1930s, remembered usually for uncomplicated political engagement, can rather be seen as initiating the key elements of postmodernism, developing the individual's sense of ‘elsewhere' through new technology of representation and propaganda. Keith Williams analyses the relationship between the leftist writers of the decade and the mass-media, showing how newspapers, radio and film were treated in their writing and how they radically reshaped its forms, assumptions and imagery.