The 1940s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

Philip Tew, Glyn White

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350143029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Critical Introduction: Reappraising the 1940s
• 1 Their Finest Hour? A Literary History of the 1940s
• 2 British Blitz Fiction of the 1940s: Another Finest Hour, Myth or Propaganda?
• 3 Genteel Bohemia: Capable Women in Women’s Fiction of the 1940s
• 4 The Ship and the Nation: Royal Navy Novels and the People’s War 1939–45
• 5 Feeling Political: Elizabeth Bowen in the 1940s
• 6 The Life of Animals: George Orwell’s Fiction in the 1940s
• 7 Masters and Servants, Class, and the Colonies in Graham Greene’s 1940s Fiction
• 8 Purposes of Love: Rethinking Intimacy in the 1940s
• 9 No Concession to ‘English’ Taste? Refugees from National Socialism Writing in Britain
• 10 Un-British: The Transatlantic Crime Film Connection
• Timeline of Works
• Timeline of National Events
• Timeline of International Events
• Biographies of Writers
• Index
• Imprint