A comprehensive, accessible and lucid coverage of major issues and key figures in modern and contemporary British literature.

This book examines literary texts by British colonial servant and settler writers, including Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, William Golding, and Alan Sillitoe, who depicted the impact of decolonization in the newly independent colonies and at home in Britain. The end of the British Empire was one of the most significant and transformative events in twentieth-century history, marking the beginning of a new world order and having an indelible impact on British culture and society. Literary responses to this moment by those from within Britain offer an enlightening (and often overlooked) exploration of the influence of decolonization on received notions of “race” and class, while also prefiguring conceptions of multiculturalism. As Matthew Whittle argues in this sweeping study, these works not only view decolonization within its global context (alongside the aftermath of the Second World War, the rise of America, and mass immigration) but often propose a solution to imperial decline through cultural renewal.

This book explores eugenics in its wider social context and in literary representations in post-war Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources in medicine, social and educational policy, genetics, popular science, science fiction, and literary texts, Hanson tracks the dynamic interactions between eugenic ideas across diverse cultural fields, demonstrating the strength of the eugenic imagination. Challenging assumptions that eugenics was fatally compromised by its association with Nazi atrocities, or that it petered out in the context of changed social attitudes in an egalitarian post-war society, the book demonstrates that eugenic thought not only persisted after 1945, but became more prominent. Throughout, eugenics is defined as a cultural movement, rather than more narrowly as a science, and the study is focused on its border-crossing capacity as a ‘style of thought.’ By tracing the expression of eugenic ideas across disciplinary boundaries and in both high and low culture, this book demonstrates the powerful and pervasive influence of eugenics in the post-war years. Authors visited include Raymond Williams, John Braine, Agatha Christie, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, and J.G. Ballard.

The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.

This book offers a unique analysis of the wide-ranging responses of British novelists to the East-West conflict. Hammond analyses the treatment of such geopolitical currents as communism, nuclearism, clandestinity, decolonisation and US superpowerdom, and explores the literary forms which writers developed to capture the complexities of the age.

This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends from 1980-2000.

Literary Research and British Postmodernism is a guide for scholars that aims to connect the complex relationships between print and multimedia, technological advancements, and the influence of critical theory that converge in postwar British literature. This era is unique in that strict boundaries between fiction, nonfiction, multimedia and print are not useful. Postmodern literature is defined by the breaking down of boundaries as a reaction to modernism and requires an innovative, multifaceted approach to research. In this guide the authors explore these complex relationships and offer strategies for researching this new period of literature. This book takes a holistic approach to postmodern literature that recognizes the way in which digital media, film, critical theory, popular music and more traditional print sources are inextricably linked. Through this approach, the authors present a broad view of “postmodernism” that includes a wide variety of British authors writing in the last half of the twentieth century. The book’s definition of “postmodern” includes any British literature following World War II that engages issues central to postmodern theory, including the social construction of gender, sexuality, and power; the subjectivity of truth; technology as a social force; intertextuality; metafiction; post-colonial narrative; and fantasy. This guide aims to aid researchers of postwar British literature by defining best practices for scholars conducting research in a period so broadly varied in the way it defines literature.

9/11 is not simple a date on the calendar but marks a distinct historical threshold, ushering in the war on terror, various states of emergency, a supposed “clash of civilizations,” and the putative legitimation of counter-democratic procedures ranging from extraordinary renditions to enhanced interrogation. Perhaps no date, since Virginia Woolf declared that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,” has marked such a singular point in the perception of time, identity and nature. Women’s writing has always been something of a counter-canon, offering modes of voice and point of view beyond that of the “man” of reason. This collection of essays explores the two problems of what it means to write as a woman and what it means to write in the twenty-first century.

The figure of the wartime child in the mid-twentieth century unsettles and disturbs. This book employs a range of material – biographical, literary and historical – to chart some of the surprising and unanticipated crossovers between women’s writing and early psychoanalysis in the years of the Second World War and the decades before and after. This volume includes examples of children’s adventure fiction, as well as works written for adult audiences and important and previously unrecognized similarities are noted. The war was a disruptive influence in the lives of all who lived through it. Although active self-censorship is observed in the behaviour and attitudes of adults at this time, this book demonstrates how fictional children are able to articulate feelings such as anxiety and fear that adults were under pressure to conceal or to repress and at times, the figure of the wartime child becomes a surrogate for the writer herself or her suppressed fears and anxiety. When peace returned, this study finds women writers quick to identify and communicate a discomfiting new ambivalence between parents and children.

According to Orwell, the North was 'a strange country.' In an industrial landscape, its inhabitants seem to inhabit a bleak world caught in the gaze of 1930s realism. Such stereotypes have been tenacious. This book challenges these stereotypes, establishing the strategic and mobile nature of 'the North' and the effects of literary realism.