'Savage warnings and notations': Wartime visions, cultural blackouts and the crisis of British literature, 1939--1949

This thesis examines the remarkably productive crisis that confronted British writers during the Second World War and seeks to challenge conventional periodizations of the 1940s as a time of absence or silence. In four chapters, I read works by a wide range of canonical figures, neglected novelists and poets, and by Winston Churchill and other strategists, as interventions in an ongoing struggle to sustain, consolidate or challenge a national culture “under siege.” I set the stage in my first chapter on poetry and novels of the First World War, tracing writers' varying attempts to contest an official surveillance directed as much at its own troops as at the enemy. In successive chapters I argue that in the Second World War civilian and military writers alike responded to their own cultural blackout with remarkable passion and resourcefulness. Contesting the commanding official visions of home front and war machine, writers like Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene were drawn to the dislocated perspectives offered by unpatriotic, transgressive figures like the spy, the spiv, the wounded veteran, the adulterous wife, or the rootless “mobile” woman conscripted into the war effort. In shorter, more fugitive forms like the short story, reportage, or essay, I suggest, civilians like Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, and writers in uniform like Evelyn Waugh and Keith Douglas, practiced a modernism in camouflage that salvaged the resources of a literary tradition shattered by war. The real rupture in twentieth century British literature, I argue, came not during the war, but after, as the “Angry” post-war generation responded to Cold War and imperial decline by rejecting the cultural debates and the aesthetic complexity of wartime.