British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar

Description

'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.

Gill Plain is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She has research interests in British literature and culture of the 1940s, war writing, crime fiction, British cinema, feminist theory and gender studies. Her publications include Women's Fiction of the Second World War (1996), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2001), Ian Rankin's 'Black and Blue': A Reader's Guide (2002), John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation (2006) and Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace' (2013). She has also edited a number of volumes including A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (co-edited with Susan Sellers, Cambridge, 2007) and Scotland and the First World War: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Bannockburn (2016). She is General Editor of the British Literature in Transition series.