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List of contents
Series Editors’ Preface
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Critical introduction: Reappraising the 1940s Philip Tew and
Glyn White
1 Their finest hour?: A literary history of the 1940s Ashley Maher
2 British Blitz fiction of the 1940s: Another finest hour, myth or
propaganda? Philip Tew
3 Genteel Bohemia: Capable women in women’s fiction of the 1940s
Deborah Philips
4 The ship and the nation: Royal Navy novels and the people’s
war 1939–45 Chris Hopkins
5 Feeling political: Elizabeth Bowen in the 1940s Karen Schaller
6 The life of animals: George Orwell’s fiction in the 1940s
Tamás Bényei
7 Masters and servants, class, and the colonies in Graham Greene’s
1940s fiction Rebecca Dyer
8 Purposes of love: Rethinking intimacy in the 1940s
Charlotte Charteris
9 No concession to ‘English’ taste? Refugees from National Socialism
writing in Britain Andrea Hammel
10 Un-British: The transatlantic crime film connection Glyn White
Timeline of Works
Timeline of UK events
Timeline of international events
Biographies of writers
Index
About the author
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 and author of Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction (2005), co-author (with the late John Mundy) of Laughing Matters: Understanding Film, Radio and Television Comedy and a contributor to Bloomsbury’s The I930s (2020).
Summary
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.
Additional text
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.
