Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace'

Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace'
Author: Gill Plain
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748631518

A groundbreaking re-reading of the literary response to a decade of trauma and transformation This study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after. Instead, it focuses on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers' immersion in and resistance to the conflict. Through seven chapters - Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomising - the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period. Detailed case studies of fiction, drama and poetry provide fresh critical perspectives on writers as diverse as Margery Allingham, Alexander Baron, Elizabeth Bowen, Keith Douglas, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Georgette Heyer, Alun Lewis, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, J. B. Priestley, Terence Rattigan, Mary Renault, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh. Key Features Detailed and theoretically informed case studies of canonical writers such as Bowen, Orwell, Greene and Waugh Case studies and critical re-evaluations of popular genre writers and forgotten writers

British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar

British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar
Author: Gill Plain
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107119014

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

Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945–85

Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945–85
Author: Mark Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317318048

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.

The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975

The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975
Author: Clare Hanson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2017-09-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137477369

This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women’s writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range and intensity of women writers’ engagement with post-war transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across ‘literary’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children’s literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism. They examine issues including realism and experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of ‘second-wave’ feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment of women’s writing at a time of radical social change and rapid cultural expansion.

A Grain of Faith

A Grain of Faith
Author: Allan Hepburn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0198828578

This volume explores how religion influenced the works of mid-century writers and how authors used Christian ideas for social and political ends in the 1940s and 1950s.

Bringing Up War-Babies

Bringing Up War-Babies
Author: Amanda Jones
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1351387057

The figure of the wartime child in the mid-twentieth century unsettles and disturbs. This book employs a range of material – biographical, literary and historical – to chart some of the surprising and unanticipated crossovers between women’s writing and early psychoanalysis in the years of the Second World War and the decades before and after. This volume includes examples of children’s adventure fiction, as well as works written for adult audiences and important and previously unrecognized similarities are noted. The war was a disruptive influence in the lives of all who lived through it. Although active self-censorship is observed in the behaviour and attitudes of adults at this time, this book demonstrates how fictional children are able to articulate feelings such as anxiety and fear that adults were under pressure to conceal or to repress and at times, the figure of the wartime child becomes a surrogate for the writer herself or her suppressed fears and anxiety. When peace returned, this study finds women writers quick to identify and communicate a discomfiting new ambivalence between parents and children.

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965
Author: Laura E. Nym Mayhall
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2022-08-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 303107159X

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.

Scripting Empire

Scripting Empire
Author: James Procter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2024-03-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198894252

Scripting Empire recovers the literary and cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC in order to rethink the critical mid-century decades of shrinking British sovereignty, late modernism, and mass migration to the metropole. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, a remarkable group of black Atlantic artists and intellectuals became producers, editors, and freelancers at the corporation, including Una Marson, Langston Hughes, Louise Bennett, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Amos Tutuola, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Cyprian Ekwensi, Stuart Hall, and C.L.R. James. Operating at the interface of a range of literary and broadcast genres, this loose network of African Caribbean writers and thinkers prompt a reassessment of the aesthetic, formal, and political fallout of decolonization between the outbreak of World War II and the first airings of post-colonial independence. Scripting Empire works comparatively across dozens of different programmes spanning the General Overseas Service, Home Service, Light Programme, and Third Programme. Drawing upon a transnational archive of materials including scripts, correspondence, periodicals, visual records, and sound recordings, it seeks to re-position the cultural contribution of West Indians and West Africans within a more pervasive and porous account of radio transmission, the legacy of which extends well beyond broadcasting.

British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960

British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960
Author: Sue Kennedy
Publisher: Liverpool English Texts and St
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1789621828

This volume contributes to the vibrant, ongoing recuperative work on women's writing by shedding new light on a group of authors commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The neologism 'interfeminism' - coined to partner Kristin Bluemel's 'intermodernism' - locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two 'waves' of feminism, whilst also forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths that have traditionally overshadowed them. Drawing attention to the strengths of this 'out-of-category' writing in its own right, this volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the interwar and post-war periods pave the way for the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterise second and third wave feminism. The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of a substantial group of women authors of fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. Additional exploration of the popular magazines Woman's Weekly and Good Housekeeping and new material from the Vera Brittain archive add an innovative dimension to original readings of the literature of a transformative period of British social and cultural history.

Wastepaper Modernism

Wastepaper Modernism
Author: Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198852444

'Wastepaper Modernism' traces how 20th-century writers imagined the fate of paper at the dawn of a new media age.