The second period in the development of English literature of the 20th century was the decade between 1930 and World War II.

The world economic crisis spread over the whole capitalist world in the beginning of the thirties. The Hunger March of the employed in 1933 was the most memorable event in Britain. The employed marched from Glasgow to London holding meetings in every town they passed.
In Germany Hitler came to power in 1933.

In 1936 the fascist mutiny of general Franco led to the Civil War in Spain. The struggle of the Spain people was supported by the democratic and anti-fascist forces all over the world. An International Brigade was formed, which fought side by side with the Spanish People’s Army against the common enemy – fascism.

Many British intellectuals and workers joined the ranks of the International Brigade. Every one of them clearly realized that the struggle against fascism in Spain was at the same time a struggle for the freedom of their own country.

The Second World War broke out in 1939.

A new generation of realist writers, among them Richard Aldington, J.B. Priestley, A.J. Cronin and others appear on the literary scene.
An important event in the literary life of the thirties was the formation of a group of Marxist writers, poets and critics. Their leader was Ralph Fox (1900-1937). He came from a bourgeois family, was educated in Oxford University, but later broke away from his class. His ideas were formed by the Great October Socialist Revolution. In 1925 he joined the Communist Party. Being a journalist, historian and literary critic, Ralph Fox devoted all his activity to spreading Marxism and fighting the enemies of the British working class. When the Civil War in Spain broke out, Ralph Fox was one of the first to join the International Brigade. He was killed in action in January 1937.

Ralph Fox’s main work is his book The novel and the people, published posthumously in 1937. The aim of the author was to show the decline of bourgeois art, and the novel in particular, together with the decline of the bourgeois in general. At the same time Ralph Fox sought to point out the way literature should develop in the future.

Ralph Fox considers that the novel reached its highest point in England in the 18th century. This was a time when the bourgeoisie was a progressive class, therefore Fox concludes that the optimistic view of the world expressed in the novels by Fielding is the best manifestation of the epic quality of the novel. Man in the novels of the Enlightenment is treated as a person who acts, who faces up to life.
Contrary to the active hero of the 18th century novel, the hero in the modern novel is an active figure, a passive creature. Fox speaks about ‘death of hero’. He means that contemporary literature is not occupied with heroic characters. Psychological subjectivity, typical of Joyce and other authors, has nothing to do with the wide epic scene of social life described by great classics. Socialist Realism must put an end to this crisis of bourgeois literature, Fox says. It should bring forward a new man, a man who knows the laws of history and can become the master of his own life. Fox speaks of Georgi Dimitrov at the Leipzig trial as an example of such a new hero. The future belongs to the heroic element in life.

This feeling of important change and the heroic spirit of the anti-fascist struggle found its outlet in the first place in the development of poetry. The trio of poets, Auden, Spender and Day Lewis, had in many ways inaugurated the new movement which sought to fuse poetry and politics. They stood out as representative figures, and on the whole they held this position till the year 1938. Then began the rapidly extending crisis of the movement. This group, usually known as the Oxford Poets, was very popular in its time. But the movement did not last long. A Marxist critic, Christopher Caudwell, in his book Illusion or Reality explains why the movement lost its popularity. “They often glorify the revolution as a kind of giant explosion which will blow up everything they feel to be hampering them. But they have no constructive theory – I mean as artists: they may as economists accept the economic categories of Socialism, but as artists they can not see the new forms and contents of an art which will replace bourgeois art.”