The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel

States of Repair

Bibliographic Data

ID23537488
AuthorsKelly M Rich (0009-0004-2220-8619, Associate Professor of English, Harvard University)
Year2023
Publication date2023-08-10
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenuePromise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780192893437.001.0001
OpenAlexW4386142623
Open LibraryOL48197609M
ISBN9780192893437
LanguageEN
References cited77

States of Repair offers a new literary history of the Second World War and its aftermath by focusing on wartime visions of rebuilding Britain. Shifting attention from the “People’s War” to the “People’s Peace,” this book shows that literature returns to the historic transition from warfare to welfare to narrate its transformative social potential and darker failures. The welfare state envisioned that managing individuals’ private lives would result in a more coherent and equitable community, a promise encapsulated in the 1942 Beveridge Report’s assurance to care for citizens from the “cradle to the grave.” The postwar novel reveals the intimate effects that follow when infrastructures of collective living seek to organize social interaction, tracing these effects through quasi-administrated home spaces such as girls’ hostels, makeshift sanatoria, and experimental schools. Midcentury writers including Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Samuel Selvon used the militarized Home Front to present postwar Britain as a zone of lost privacy and new collective logics. As the century progressed, and as the unrealized dreams of welfare came to be dismantled, authors including Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro registered an unfulfilled nostalgia for a Britain that never was, situating British domestic policies within trajectories of historic and social violence. Contemporary fiction continues to reanimate the transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, preserving its transformative potential while redefining its possible futures. With this long view of postwar fiction, States of Repair demonstrates the holding power of welfare’s promises of repair and Britain’s midcentury on cultural imagination.

Economic history · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Transformative learning · Vision · Welfare · Welfare state · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Tools

Open DOI