British Culture of the Post-War

An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945-1999

Alastair Davies, Alan Sinfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135100155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Angus Wilson to Pat Barker and Salman Rushdie, British Culture of the Post-War is an ideal starting point for those studying cultural developments in Britain of recent years. Chapters on individual people and art forms give a clear and concise overview of the progression of different genres. They also discuss the wider issues of Britain's relationship with America and Europe, and the idea of Britishness.
Each section is introduced with a short discussion of the major historical events of the period. Read as a whole, British Culture of the Postwar will give students a comprehensive introduction to this turbulent and exciting period, and a greater understanding of the cultural production arising from it.

Part I

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From imperial to post-imperial Britain

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The postwar world order

When the Second World War ended, millions of Britons took to the streets to celebrate. After six years of suffering, their joy was under- standable, but the cost of victory was huge. 264,000 servicemen and 90,000 civilians had been killed in the war. The industrial and com- mercial centres of cities and towns, in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as in England, had been destroyed in the blitz. Much of Britain’s housing stock and physical infrastructure – railways, roads, schools and hospitals – had suffered severe bomb damage. Basic food- stuffs were in short supply, while industry faced disabling shortages of raw materials, machinery and markets. The British economy, which had been one of the strongest before the war, was now technically bankrupt, sustained only by America’s ability and willingness to extend credit. Those dancing in the streets were largely oblivious to the ways in which the war had transformed the global political and economic order and Britain’s position within it.

In 1939, Britain was the world’s greatest imperial power; by 1945, even though the empire remained intact, Britain was an enfeebled state in a world divided between two new superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union. Britain’s wartime defeats had convinced many under British rule that the British Empire was no longer invulnerable. The ease, for instance, with which the Japanese overwhelmed Singapore in 1942 had an immediate impact on the region, with the result that British troops had to be stationed in India to keep nationalist agitation in check. Winston Churchill, the wartime Prime Minister, could not conceive of an independent India, declaring that he had not become the King’s chief minister to oversee the dissolution of the British Empire. However, the new Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, fol- lowing his landslide election victory of 1945, made Indian independence a priority, in part because it had been a long-standing Labour Party commitment, in part because he realised that Britain lacked the resources to hold India. Nevertheless, after India became independent in 1947, the Labour government was as keen as the Conservatives to hold on to what remained of the empire, for without it, Britain had no hope of preserving its status as a world power (Robbins 1998; Morgan 1999).

Suez and Europe

The Conservatives returned to power in 1951. Their most dramatic attempt to slow down the pace of de-colonisation, however, had the effect of speeding it up. In 1956, the British, French and Israeli gov- ernments conspired to invade Egypt, in retaliation for its nationalisation of the strategic Suez Canal, the British empire’s direct link by sea with Arab oil and its colonies in South-East Asia. The action not only divided public opinion in Britain with an unprece- dented intensity, it was also condemned by the rest of the world, most significantly by the USA which threatened to speculate against the pound. British troops were withdrawn and the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, was forced to resign. Five years later in 1961, Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan made the first (unsuccessful) attempt to join the recently formed European Economic Community. The decision, like Suez, again divided public opinion, but for the political elite (on the left as on the right), the lesson of Suez was that Britain was no longer a world power. While its traditional ties with the empire and the Commonwealth and its close postwar alliance with the USA were important, its future lay in a still to be defined relationship with Europe. British politics have ever since been preoccupied with the attempt to define the exact nature of that relationship.

Post-imperial melancholy

‘Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role,’ one American politician famously remarked in 1962. Many of the leading British and American commentators on postwar British culture have echoed his sentiments. For them, the politics and culture of postwar Britain have been defined by evasive inwardness and nostalgia (Hewison 1977, 1981, 1986), cultural retardation (Wiener 1981), middle-class conformism (Nehring 1993), anti-technological romanti- cism (Veldman 1994) and insularity (Piette 1995). The cultivation of empiricism in philosophy, of the figurative in painting, of realism in fiction, of the personal voice in poetry, and of the comic and the domestic in film and television has involved a very conscious refusal of the dominant forms of artistic modernity in postwar America and Europe (Appleyard 1989).

Most strikingly, the postwar period reveals a loss of confidence and ambition amongst British writers (Kenner 1987). Critics of the postwar novel in Britain have suggested that the turn to fabulation, allegory and self-reflectiveness – from William Golding to John Le Carré, Iris Murdoch to J. G. Farrell, Elizabeth Bowen to Paul Scott – mirrors the end of imperialism’s confidence in historical narrative (Scanlan 1990; Connor 1996). Similarly, critics of postwar poetry and drama in Britain have found writers (John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Donald Davie) either expressing a profound resentment and anxiety at Britain’s loss of imperial status or (Trevor Griffiths, David Edgar, David Hare and Geoffrey Hill) analysing that resentment and anxiety (Morrison 1980; Sinfield 1983; Moore-Gilbert 1994).

The popular success in the 1980s of the ‘Raj revival’ in films and TV dramas and of ‘heritage’ films set in the Edwardian period (no less than support for the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982) convinced many that post-imperial British culture remained, four decades after the end of the Second World War, in a state of unresolved mourning for a glorious past, when the empire gave Britons (or rather the English) an unshake- able sense not only of their intrinsic superiority but also of their central position in world affairs (Wright 1985; Hewison 1987; Corner and Harvey 1991; Samuel 1994; for discussion of ‘heritage culture’ in Scotland, McCrone et al. 1995; and Northern Ireland, Brett 1996).

Counter-cultural Britain

For other leading interpreters, however, this is not the whole story. The rise of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, they suggest, has had decisive effects in creating a positive, post-imperial culture in Britain, a culture coinciding with or provoking profound social and political re-alignments and transformations: ‘the harvest of the sixties’ in Patricia Waugh’s memorable phrase (Sinfield 1989 and 1997; Marwick 1991 and 1998; Waugh 1995). Women writers appeared – notably Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble – who devoted them- selves to the disadvantaged position and distinctive insights of women. In Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as the demand for devolution or separation became more powerful (Bogdanor 1999), a new generation of dissident intellectuals began to make fundamental challenges to the subordinate position of the regions within what they considered to be Britain’s English dominated unitary state. (Tom Nairn’s seminal The Break-Up of Britain was published in 1977, a Marxist critique of nationalism which has been central to subsequent debates about the topic (Nairn 1988; Beveridge and Turnbull 1989; McCrone 1992; Craig 1996; Nairn 1997).)

From the 1960s onwards, writers and intellectuals began to reflect on the ways in which the influx of immigrants, largely from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and East Africa, was changing British culture. Even while detailing the politics of racism in the postwar period and the riots of the early 1980s, recent commentators have argued that since the 1970s, youth and popular cultures have shaped new trans-ethnic identities in Britain (Gilroy 1987; Hebdige 1987), while post-colonial critics, examining the globalisation both of the economy and of culture, have taken the migrant experience – the loss of home, the crossing of borders, the inhabiting of different selves – to define the experience of the majority under globalisation (Bhabha 1994; Chambers 1994).

Post-colonial metaphors and post-colonial actualities

Nations, however, are not just imaginary states but actual formations of power. For a new generation of British historians and cultural critics, Britain is less a unitary state than a unionist one with long-standing affiliations to a Protestant monarchy, an established Church, and a national parliament (Kearney 1989; Colley 1992; Samuel 1998). While unionism has made possible the relative cultural autonomy of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, it has also set inevitable limits to change (Paterson 1994; Mitchell 1996; Bogdanor 1999). Recent proposals to end the civil war in Northern Ireland by sharing sovereignty between Britain and Ireland (a solution made easier by the pooling of sover- eignty within the European Union) have confirmed for some Irish post-colonial thinkers not only a positive detachment in both states of the idea of nationality from the idea of the nation-state, but also in Britain a willingness to question unionist institutions (Kearney 1997). As Siobhán Kilfeather reminds us in her essay in this book, writing in Ireland, Scotland and Wales has taken place within and against the structures of the unionist state. Indeed, many Scottish and Welsh writers, she argues, have taken inspiration from Ireland’s successful political and cultural independence from Britain (even if the newly independent Irish state was to prove a culturally repressive one). Migration also, as Minoli Salgado argues in her essay on Salman Rushdie, is not merely a metaphorical condition but is experienced by many in Britain as a condition of profound social and economic inequality. There is an essential difference between those like Rushdie who migrate between two elites and those who migrate for reasons of economic necessity. These are both timely interventions in key post- colonial debates: debates which more than any other continue to raise questions about the nature and possibility of Britain’s post-imperial identity.

Bibliography

General studies on postwar British politics and history

Childs, D. (1997) Britain since 1945: A Political History , 4th edn, London: Routledge.

Marwick, A. (1996) British Society since 1945 , 3rd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Morgan, K. O. (1984) Labour in Power, 1945–51 , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

—— (1999) The People’s Peace: British History since 1945 , 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Robbins, K. (1998) ‘Fragile bearings 1945–’ and ‘Losing (domestic) bearings? 1945–’, in Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness , London: Longman: 297–343.

Sked, A. and Cook, C. (1993) Post-War Britain: A Political History, 1945–1992 , 4th edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

General studies on postwar British culture and identity

Appleyard, B. (1989) The Pleasures of Peace: Art and Imagination in Postwar Britain, London: Faber.

Hewison, R. (1977) Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939–45 , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

—— (1981) In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 1945–60 , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

—— (1986) Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties, 1960–1975 , London: Methuen.

—— (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline , London: Methuen.

—— (1995) Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940 , London: Methuen.

Kenner, H. (1987) A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers , New York: Knopf.

Marwick, A. (1991) Culture in Britain since 1945 , Oxford: Blackwell.

—— (1998) The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nehring, N. (1993) Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy and Postwar England, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Piette, A. (1995) Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 , London: Papermac.

Sinfield, A. (1989) Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain , Oxford: Blackwell.

—— (1997) Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain , 2nd edn, London: Athlone.

Veldman, M. (1994) Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945–1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Waugh, P. (1995) The Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and Its Background, 1960–1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wiener, M. J. (1981) English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

General studies on post-imperial Britain

Beveridge, C. and Turnbull, R. (1989) The Eclipse of Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intellectuals , Edinburgh: Polygon.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture , London: Routledge.

Bogdanor, V. (1999) Devolution in the United Kingdom , 2nd rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brah, A. (1996) ‘Constructions of the “Asian” in post-war Britain: culture, politics and identity in the pre-Thatcher years’, in Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London: Routledge.

Brett, D. (1996) The Construction of Heritage , Cork: Cork University Press.

Chambers, I. (1994) Migrancy, Culture, Identity , London: Routledge.

Colley, L. (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 , New Haven: Yale University Press.

Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (1991) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture, London: Routledge.

Curtis, T. (1986) Wales: The Imagined Nation. Essays in Cultural and National Identity, Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press.

Gilroy, P. (1987) ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, London: Hutchinson.

Harvie, C. (1998) Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707 to the Present, 3rd edn, London: Routledge.

Hebdige, D. (1987) Cut’n’mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music , London: Routledge.

Kearney, H. F. (1989) The British Isles: A History of Four Nations , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kearney, R. (1997) Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy , London: Routledge.

McCrone, D. (1992) Understanding Scotland: the Sociology of a Stateless Nation , London: Routledge.

McCrone, D., Morris, A. and Kiely, R. (ed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I From imperial to post-imperial Britain
• Part II From welfare state to free market
• Part III Britain, Europe andAmericanisation
• Part IV Class, consumptionand culturalinstitutions
• Index