Literary non-combatants: Contemporary British fiction and the new war novel

"Literary Non-Combatants: Contemporary British Fiction and the New War Novel" examines mid- and late-twentieth-century writers whose experience of the Second World War leads them to revise the genre of war literature. This dissertation emphasizes the figure of the non-combatant in order to correct the tendency in scholarship on war literature to focus too narrowly on the experiences of combatants. Such a focus not only limits the scope of our understanding of the effects of war on national identity and culture, but also fails to respond to the realities of modern warfare. Evidenced by German blitzkrieg, the atomic bomb, and Allied fire-bombing, the Second World War made definitive the breakdown of clear distinctions between combatants and non-combatants and, as a result, neutrality and complicity on national and personal levels, in war.;Reading novels published between the Second World War and its fiftieth anniversary, "Literary Non-Combatants" argues that British novelists write from the perspective of the non-combatant in order to critique dominant national narratives of the war, such as "The People's War" and "The Good War." Consequently, these authors also question the larger narratives of nation and empire that inform British memorialization of the war. The first half turns to the works of Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh, in which the non-combatant is an often overlooked, yet key figure who registers the social trauma experienced by both Britain and its citizens as a result of the war. The second half then moves to the works of Kazuo Ishiguro and W. G. Sebald, who wrote in the generation after the war, in order to examine how British war narratives are reimagined by a growing awareness of Britain's place in the international community. By selecting a group of authors that includes British citizens and resident aliens, "Literary Non-Combatants" argues that this account of contemporary British fiction and modern war writing must be understood in the contexts of globalization and the decline of the British empire.