Edwardian Turn Of Mind

The Edwardian Turn of Mindbrilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors. His book is a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporary England was made.

Samuel Hynes was born in Chicago in 1924 and was educated at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. He has taught at Swarthmore College, Northwestern University and Princeton University. From 1943 to 1956, and again in 1952-3, he served as a pilot in the United States Marine Corps. His books includeThe Pattern of Hardy's Poetry,Edwardian OccasionsandFlights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator.

The Edwardian Turn of Mindis the first volume of Samuel Hynes's trilogy of cultural histories covering the relationship between literature, theatre and public events during the first decades of the twentieth century. The others -A War ImaginedandThe Auden Generation- are also published by Pimlico.