British Literature of the Blitz

Historians concerned with Britain during the Second World War have become increasingly comfortable with the use of feature film as an index of wartime social and cultural values; but they have remained sceptical about the value of novels, plays and verse as legitimate primary sources. In addition, recourse among literary scholars to some of the more opaque aspects of linguistic deconstruction may have strained the goodwill of even those historians sympathetic to interdisciplinary methodologies. The latter may certainly account for the unfortunate failure of historians to acknowledge, let alone respond to, Mark Rawlinson's ambitious deployment of novels and memoirs to recover how those who experienced the war came to understand it symbolically. Hopefully Kristine Miller's study of conflicted representations of class and gender in British literature of the Blitz will offer a renewed opportunity to demonstrate the benefits to be accrued from incorporating both literary texts and literary analysis into an evaluation of the extent to which British society was fundamentally refashioned between 1939 and 1945. For, while a literary scholar, Miller has produced a compelling study which is both solicitous of, and accessible to, historical readers. In contrast to the emphasis placed by most literary scholars of the Second World War on psychology, language and metaphor, Miller privileges political and historical readings of her chosen texts. Indeed, she clearly owes a debt to Sonya Rose's seminal historical study Which People's War (2003; rev. ante, cxix [2004], 1365–8), which emphasised the absence of a singular meaning attached to the experience of the war. However, whereas Rose revealed how Britons from various backgrounds (social, sexual and racial) understood the notion of a people's war in conflicting and contradictory ways, Miller reveals that, in literature, these different understandings can be located within, rather than just between, individual accounts

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literary criticism · Literature · Meaning (existential · Memoir · Metaphor · Miller · Political science · Politics · Realism · Skepticism · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Classics · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

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