Overview

Challenges the myths about apathy and smugness surrounding British literature of the period. Alice Ferrebe's lively study rereads the decade and its literature as crucial in twentieth-century British history for its emergent and increasingly complicated politics of difference, as ideas about identity, authority and belonging were tested and contested. By placing a diverse selection of texts alongside those of the established canon of Movement and 'Angry' writing, a literary culture of true diversity and depth is brought into view. The volume characterises the 1950s as a time of confrontation with a range of concerns still avidly debated today, including immigration, education, the challenging behaviour of youth, nuclear threat, the post-industrial and post-imperial legacy, a consumerist economy and a feminist movement hampered by the perceivedly comprehensive nature of its recent success. Contrary to Jimmy Porter's defeatist judgement on his era in John Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger, the volume upholds such concerns as 'good, brave causes' indeed.

Full Product Details

Author:   Alice Ferrebe (Senior Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9780748627721

ISBN 10:   0748627723
Pages:   264
Publication Date:   31 January 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Language:   English

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Chapter 1. Introduction: 'All this, and Everest too!'; I. The Voice of the Young; Chapter 2. The Metaphorical Utility of Youth; Chapter 3. Angering Aunt Edna: 1950s Theatre; Chapter 4. First Writing: 1950s Fiction; III. The Less Deceived; Chapter 5. Women, Children and Home; Chapter 6. The Sensation of Movement: Poetry in the 50s; Chapter 7. Evil Men: Literature and Homosexuality; II. Postwar Settlements; Chapter 8. Coming Home: The Literature of Immigration; Chapter 9. Organic Communities: Regional Literature; Chapter 10. The Scholarship Class: Literature and Social Mobility; IV. Other Uses of Literacy; Chapter 11. Criticism Under Scrutiny; Chapter 12. The Dedicated Man: Publishing, Media and Reviewing; Chapter 13. Where East Meets West: Literature, the New Left and the Cold War; Chapter 14. Conclusions; Works Cited.

Reviews

Shrewd, lucid and perceptive, Alice Ferrebe's splendid book shows how the supposedly greyest of post-war decades was, in fact, an age of tremendous imagination, diversity and confrontation. From Amis and Larkin to Osborne and Fleming, Ferrebe brings new life to the literary world of the 1950s. -- Dominic Sandbrook, author of Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles

Author Information

Alice Ferrebe is a Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University, and is the author of Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950-2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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