Literature of the 1940s

This study focuses on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers' immersion in and resistance to the Second World War. Through seven chapters, Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomizing, the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period, arguing that the postwar is a concept that emerges almost simultaneously with the war itself, and that "peace" is significant only by its absence in an emergent post-Atomic cold war era.