The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel: States of Repair

The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British Novel explores the transition from warfare to welfare in postwar Britain, focusing on the transformative social potential and darker failures of the welfare state. It reveals the intimate effects of collective living infrastructures on social interaction, and authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Samuel Selvon present postwar Britain as a zone of lost privacy and new collective logics. Contemporary fiction continues to reanimate this transition, preserving its transformative potential while redefining its possible futures.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 10 August 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press

The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British Novel presents a fresh literary perspective on the Second World War and its aftermath, shifting focus from the People's War to the People's Peace. This book reveals that literature revisits the historical transition from warfare to welfare, exploring its transformative social potential and darker failures. The welfare state envisioned a cohesive and equitable community by managing individuals' private lives, a promise encapsulated in the 1942 Beveridge Report's pledge of care from cradle to grave.

The postwar novel delves into the intimate consequences of infrastructures of collective living attempting to organize social interaction. It traces these effects through quasi-administrated home spaces such as girls' hostels, makeshift sanatoria, and experimental schools. Mid-century writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Samuel Selvon portrayed postwar Britain as a zone of lost privacy and emerging collective logics, utilizing the militarized Home Front as a backdrop.

As the century unfolded, and the unrealized dreams of welfare began to unravel, authors like Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro expressed a longing for a Britain that never existed, situating British domestic policies within trajectories of historic and social violence. Contemporary fiction continues to reimagine the transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, preserving its transformative potential while redefining its possible futures. With a comprehensive view of postwar fiction, this volume showcases the enduring influence of welfare's promises of repair and Britain's mid-century on the British cultural imagination.

Weight: 484g
Dimension: 147 x 223 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192893437