British Fiction 1945 to Present

More than in any other age, perhaps, writers of the period 1945-2005 have been endlessly and self-reflexively preoccupied with narratives of history and identity, with memory, and with the construction and reconstruction of self and society. The period is marked by powerful emotions: guilt and horror in the wake of World War Two and the Holocaust; anxieties about the feeling of cultural exhaustion after Modernism or the loss of a common culture and the crisis in realism, but also a sense of new opportunities, political realignments, the rediscovery of buried traditions and the utopianism of emancipatory politics.

This history will be organised in chronological fashion engaging with histories, critical perspectives, texts and movements, but will avoid the bland chronicle or overview by departing from, or problematising, in various ways, a straightforward chronology. Each chapter will contain a ‘snapshot’ section which takes a significant year in the decade and focuses intensely on the constellation of cultural and political practices and events, literary publications and activities, key texts and subsequent mythologisations of the ‘moment’. Each chapter will also select two or three significant themes or motifs which evolve throughout the period or rework preoccupations which predate 1945. Each chapter will also allow space to dwell in some depth on a selection of texts, chosen for both their broader historical and literary significance.