Overview

How did social, cultural and political events concerning Britain during the 1940s reshape modern British fiction? During the Second World War and in its aftermath, British literature experienced and recorded drastic and decisive changes to old certainties. Moving from potential invasion and defeat to victory, the creation of the welfare state and a new Cold war threat, the pace of historical change seemed too rapid and monumental for writers to match. Consequently the 1940s were often side-lined in literary accounts as a dividing line between periods and styles. Drawing on more recent scholarship and research, this volume surveys and analyses this period’s fascinating diversity, from novels of the Blitz and the Navy to the rise of important new voices with its contributors exploring the work of influential women, Commonwealth, exiled, genre, avant-garde and queer writers. A major critical re-evaluation of the intriguing decade, this book offers substantial chapters on Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and George Orwell as well as covering such writers as Jocelyn Brooke, Monica Dickens, James Hadley Chase, Patrick Hamilton, Gerald Kersh, Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Renault, Denton Welch and many others.

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9781350280618

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This is an original and very timely contribution to the emergent field of mid-century studies. It offers extended new readings of such indisputably major figures as Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and George Orwell at the same time as it undertakes some important recoveries of the period's once-familiar names. This wide-ranging collection will be of interest to any reader hoping to understand better the rich and complex literature of twentieth-century Britain's most powerfully consequential decade. --Marina MacKay, Professor, St Peter's College, University of Oxford, UK The 1940s brings together top scholars who illuminate the period's compelling myths and lost cultures, guiding us from literary lodestars like Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, and Graham Greene to such fascinating and neglected subjects as Royal Navy novels, women's fictions of genteel bohemia, and the exile literature of German and Austrian refugees from National Socialism. --Kristin Bluemel, Professor of English, Monmouth University, USA

Author Information

Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University, UK, Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing and Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies. His many publications as both author and editor include Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2013) and (co-edited with Emily Horton and Leigh Wilson) The 1980s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014). Glyn White is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture at the University of Salford, UK. His previous books include Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction (2005.

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