British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960: Postwar

Examines debates central to postwar British culture, showing the pressures of reconstruction and the mutual implication of war and peace.

Gill Plain (Edited by)

9781107119017, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 December 2018

438 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.8 cm, 0.76 kg

'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.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literature: history & criticism [DS]