The 1940s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew and Glynn White, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, (PDF) x + 347 pp., ISBN ePDF: 978-1-3501-4303-6. £117

Abstract

The 1940s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, published by Bloomsbury Academic, is the seventh book in the ‘The Decades Series,’ which was inaugurated by The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction in 2014. The 1940s is edited by Philip Dew and Glynn White, who open it with their “Critical Introduction: Reappraising the 1940s.” The first three parts of this Introduction (“Socio-historical contexts,” “Dunkirk and other propaganda,” “Reappraising the 1940s”) highlight the most characteristic features of the decade from the historical, social as well as literary perspectives, pointing out its uniqueness and watershed character, as well as factors influencing the literary output of this decade, such as the overtly propagandist use of literature, paper rationing and censorship. The next three parts of the Introduction are (perhaps a bit surprisingly) mini critical essays aimed at three groups of novels and novelists. The first of them, “Not the usual suspects,” presents two novels by writers better known as poets: Philip Larkin and Stevie Smith. The second is “Waugh time” (a pun which Evelyn Waugh probably would not have liked, as he did not like Waugh in Abyssinia), which focuses on two Waugh’s wartime novels: Put Out More Flags (1942) and Brideshead Revisited (1945), and concludes with the statement “that Waugh and others [...] were necessarily raised in the pre-war world with all the experiences that entailed” (19). “From the ranks,” the third mini-essay, is a survey of shorter fiction and novels written by Gerald Kersh and Julian Maclaren-Ross. The ten chapters of The 1940s can be roughly divided into two parts. The opening part, consisting of the first three chapters, contains three surveys of the literature of the decade in question (but also, to a considerable extent, of the 1930s), while of the remaining seven chapters/essays, six are more like case studies of narrower groups of texts/writers. The three opening chapters have different focal points and perspectives. The opening chapter of the book, written by Ashley Maher and entitled “The Finest Hour? A Literary History of the 1940s,” examines the decade’s “divisions and continuities from three angles: historically, through the blurring of war and peacetime, self and state; geographically, through migration and the dissolution of empire, amid the changing formation of British identity and literature; and literary historically, through the co-existence of late modernism, realism and incipient postmodernism” (38). Maher’s survey focuses on both the shorter and longer fiction of George Orwell, Christopher