Their finest hour? A literary history of the 1940s

In literary and political histories of twentieth-century Britain, the year 1945 frequently serves as a stark divider, yet we might more productively characterize the 1940s in terms of the decade’s blurred boundaries—historical, geographic, and literary. The tendency to present 1945 as a turning point was as much prescriptive as descriptive, for the propaganda of the Second World War and its aftermath—advanced at times by writers themselves—promised a fresh start, a new Britain. Through this intrusive governmental speech and the collectivism of the People’s War, however, individual and group consciousness seemingly merged, with significant consequences for literary form. While Commonwealth writers invigorated a literary scene exhausted by conflict, the post-war nation faced the folly of partitions and of propagandized imperial unity. The terminology for conceptualizing this varied body of writing has been similarly uncertain, with later critics proposing designations such as mid-century, intermodernism, and late modernism.