British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar
Cambridge University Press, 12/20/2018
EAN 9781107119017, ISBN10: 1107119014
Hardcover, 350 pages, 23.5 x 15.9 x 2.8 cm
Language: English
'Postwar' is both a period and a state of mind, a sensibility comprised of hope, fear and fatigue in which British society and its writers paradoxically yearned both for political transformation and a nostalgic re-instatement of past securities. From the Labour landslide victory of 1945 to the emergence of the Cold War and the humiliation of Suez in 1956, this was a period of radical political transformation in Britain and beyond, but these changes resisted literary assimilation. Arguing that writing and history do not map straightforwardly one onto the other, and that the postwar cannot easily be fitted into the explanatory paradigms of modernism or postmodernism, this book offers a more nuanced recognition of what was written and read in the period. From wartime radio writing to 1950s travellers, cold war poetry to radical theatre, magazine cultures to popular fiction, this volume examines important debates that animated postwar Britain.
Introduction Gill Plain
Part I. Aftermath
The Beginning or the End?
Introduction
1. Slender means
the novel in the age of austerity Marina MacKay
2. Impossible elegies
poetry in transition 1940–1960 Nigel Alderman
3. Democracy and decentralisation
the Renaissance of British theatre? Rebecca D'Monté
4. National transitions
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland Katie Gramich
5. Heroes of austerity
genre in transition Gill Plain
6. Wireless writing, World War II and the West Indian literary imagination James Procter
Part II. The Politics of Transition
Introduction
7. Narrating transitions to peace
fiction and film after war Mark Rawlinson
8. Poetry, the early Cold War and the idea of Europe Adam Piette
9. Horizon, encounter and mid-century geopolitics Thomas S. Davis
10. Public intellectuals and the politics of literature
the causes and collaborations of J. B. Priestley and Jacquetta Hawkes Priestley Ina Habermann
11. Prizing the nation
postwar children's fiction Lucy Pearson
12. Artists of their time
the postwar battle for realism in literature and painting Alice Ferrebe
Part III. Reconfigurations
Introduction
13. Demob
the postwar origins of the new nature writing Leo Mellor
14. Old haunts
childhood and home in postwar fiction Victoria Stewart
15. New uses of literacy
the blank page and writing in the aftermath of war Tracy Hargreaves
16. The pursuit of love
writing postwar desire Charlotte Charteris
17. Creating vital theatre
new voices in a time of transition Claire Cochrane
Part IV. No Directions
Introduction
18. Covert legacies in postwar British fiction James Smith
19. 'The sights are worse than the journeys'
travel writing at the mid-century Petra Rau
20. The future and the end
imagining catastrophe in mid-century British fiction Allan Hepburn
21. Exhausted literature
the postwar novel in repose Kate McLoughlin.