Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace'
Volume 5
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:10th Sep '13
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
A groundbreaking re-reading of the literary response to a decade of trauma and transformation This new 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 Atomizing – 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, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Georgette Heyer, Alun Lewis, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, J. B. Priestley, Terrence Rattigan, Mary Renault, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh. Arguing that the postwar is a concept that emerges almost simultaneously with the war itself, and that ‘peace’ is significant only by its absence in an emergent post-Atomic cold war era, this book reclaims the complexity of a decade all too often lost in the fault-lines between pre-war modernism and the emergence of the postmodern. Key Features: Detailed, theoretically informed case studies of canonical writers such as Bowen, Orwell, Greene and WaughDetailed case studies and critical re-evaluations of popular genre writers, and forgotten writers.
The main attraction of Gill Plain’s book lies in its entertainingly accessible coverage of literary texts and social, intellectual issues. It is grounded in scholarly research, yet it is impressively free of scholarly jargon. -- Robert Martínez, Eastern Illinois University * Journal of British Studies 53.3 *
Gill Plain is a passionate, omnivorous and discerning reader, with strong instincts for what matters and sharp insights into its significance. In this rich and innovative study, she attends to verse dramas and domestic thrillers, forgotten authors and big names alike in order to redress the neglect of an explosive, melancholy and jagged decade. Her live, highly democratic sense of personal dislocation and social reverberations creates a powerful portrait of complex mentalités at a time when, as Elizabeth Bowen wrote, everyone existed ‘in a state of lucid abnormality.’ * Marina Warner, University of Essex *
[A] meticulous work of literary-historical scholarship. -- Claire Seiler, Dickinson College * Modernism/modernity, Volume 22, Number 4 *
It’s hard to imagine a better guide to the literary world of the 1940s than Gill Plain’s lucid, witty, and engaging volume. This is a book destined to send readers to the library to discover and re-discover the impressive array of texts discussed. It sheds brilliant light on how writers bore witness to the traumas and upheavals of the entire decade. * Susan R. Grayzel, University of Mississippi *
‘Literature of the 1940s is a coherent and comprehensive whole about a fragmentary decade.’ -- Lucy Scholes * Times Literary Supplement *
ISBN: 9780748627448
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 614g
312 pages