'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.
Author(s): Gill Plain (editor)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 440
City: Cambridge
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Contents
Contributors
General Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
part i: aftermath: the beginning or the end?
Introduction
1 Slender Means: The Novel in the Age of Austerity
2 Impossible Elegies: Poetry in Transition 1940–1960
3 Democracy, Decentralisation and Diversity
4 National Transitions: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
5 Heroes of Austerity: Genre in Transition
6 Wireless Writing, the Second World War and the West Indian Literary Imagination
part ii: the politics of transition
Introduction
7 Narrating Transitions to Peace: Fiction and Film after War
8 Poetry, the Early Cold War and the Idea of Europe
9 Horizon, Encounter and Mid-Century Geopolitics
10 Public Intellectuals and the Politics of Literature
11 Prizing the Nation: Postwar Children’s Fiction
12 Artists of Their Time
part iii: reconfigurations
Introduction
13 Demob: The Postwar Origins of the New Nature Writing
14 Old Haunts: Childhood and Home in Postwar Fiction
15 New Uses of Literacy
16 The Pursuit of Love: Writing Postwar Desire
17 Creating Vital Theatre: New Voices in a Time of Transition
part iv: no directions
Introduction
18 Covert Legacies in Postwar British Fiction
19 ‘The Sights are Worse than the Journeys’
20 The Future and the End
21 Exhausted Literature: The Postwar Novel in Repose
Index
