Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace': Volume 5 (The Edinburgh History of Twentieth Century Literature in Britain EUP), by Gill Plain
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Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace': Volume 5 (The Edinburgh History of Twentieth Century Literature in Britain EUP), by Gill Plain
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A groundbreaking re-reading of the literary response to a decade of trauma and transformationThis study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after. Instead, it focuses on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers' immersion in and resistance to the conflict. Through seven chapters - Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomising - the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period. Detailed case studies of fiction, drama and poetry provide fresh critical perspectives on writers as diverse as Margery Allingham, Alexander Baron, Elizabeth Bowen, Keith Douglas, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Georgette Heyer, Alun Lewis, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, J. B. Priestley, Terence Rattigan, Mary Renault, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh. Key FeaturesDetailed and theoretically informed case studies of canonical writers such as Bowen, Orwell, Greene and Waugh Case studies and critical re-evaluations of popular genre writers and forgotten writers
Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace': Volume 5 (The Edinburgh History of Twentieth Century Literature in Britain EUP), by Gill Plain- Amazon Sales Rank: #3127652 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.10" h x .80" w x 9.20" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review The main attraction of Gill Plain's book lies in its entertainingly accessible coverage of literary texts and social, intellectual issues. It is grounded in scholarly research, yet it is mpressively free of scholarly jargon. - Robert Martínez, Eastern Illinois University, Journal of British Studies ?53.3
[A] meticulous work of literary-historical scholarship. - Claire Seiler, Modernism/modernityAbout the Author Gill Plain is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. She has published extensively on twentieth-century popular culture, crime fiction, gender, sexuality and the writing of the two world wars. Her previous books include John Mills and British Cinema (Edinburgh 2006), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh, 2001), and Women's Fiction of the Second World War (Edinburgh, 1996).
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Comprehensive Survey of a Neglected Period in British Literary History By Dr. Laurence Raw The 1940s are often regarded as an undistinguished period in English literary history, a stop-gap between the Modernist movement of the Twenties and Thirties and the so-called "Angry Young Men" of the Fifties. Gill Plain's excellent survey of the literature of the period suggests otherwise.The book is divided into two main sections - "War" and "Peace." Plain believes that the literature changed radically between 1939 and 1945 and 1945 onwards: whereas writers in the earlier period were more concerned with survival in an environment where no one knew what their life-expectancy might be, postwar writers were much more preoccupied with the state of the nation, and how (or whether) it could reconstruct itself after six years of conflict.Many of the writers surveyed in this book were either already established or about to establish themselves during World War II - Henry Green, Mary Renault, Dylan Thomas, Evelyn Waugh. During the wartime period their work became much darker in tone as they began to question whether established belief-systems - religious, social, political or moral - could ever survive. Plain tells a story already much-covered by historians of the period: while the war brought great damage to Great Britain, it also laid the foundations for a radical change in attitudes, especially towards class and politics, that found their most obvious expression in the British Labour Party's landslide victory in 1945. What makes literary texts more interesting than other forms of expression (diaries, journalism, etc.) is that they represent individual writers' responses to a rapidly shifting situation - most of them recognized that what they believed today might not be the same tomorrow, and that they had to acknowledge the transience of the world around them.In truth, the postwar section of the book is perhaps the most engaging, as Plain looks at authors who reflected - quite justifiably - on the difficulties of winning the peace, which proved much less straightforward than winning the war. Rationing, housing shortages, a lack of basic industries - all of these were compounded by other necessary consequences of peace, such as soldiers returning to their homes and looking for work. It is thus hardly surprising that many of Britain's major cities ended up quite shabby as well as unsafe places, with petty crime and black-marketeering running rife. The state of Britain at that time is well captured in the academic B. Ifor Evans' THE SHOP ON THE KING'S ROAD (1946), a lesser-known novel dealing with demobilization and its consequences.The only possible fault with this excellent book is that Plain sometimes spends a little too long discussing novels in detail, presupposing (no doubt) that readers are already acquainted with them. Perhaps a little more historical contextualization and a little less lit. crit. might have been better. Nonetheless LITERATURE OF THE 1940s is a welcome addition to the rapidly-expanding criticism of an hitherto neglected era in British literary history.
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