Women’s Writing 1945-60: After The Deluge, ed

Abstract

Women’s fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction represent the complex nexus of continuity and change in the British consciousness following the Second World War. They revise residual myths that the 1940s spawned an homogeneously egalitarian culture which evolved into a classless Britain in the 1950s, that feminism was an anachronism and that literature was exhausted. These essays extend histories of postwar literary trends which tend to concentrate on the novel, to the exclusion of other genres. They restore the cultural and literary significance of women as readers and writers, examining their various transmutations of international, national and domestic politics. The woman-centred writing illuminated in this collection also enhances the tradition-in-process of women’s literature which often shifts between conventional categories. In this period, women’s artistic practice negotiates between the realism and fantasy variously associated with high modernist, popular ‘middlebrow’ and prewar liberal realist writing.