Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and "Peace"

“Not the mother type”: Exploding the Myth of Maternal Devotion in Marghanita Laski's To Bed with Grand Music

“…Rejecting domesticity remains controversial to this day, and even more so in times of national or international crisis such as wars. Laski's novel belongs squarely to the literature of the 1940s as Gill Plain defines that particular corpus, one for which the 'Second World War really does change everything', 10 and one haunted not only by the war but preoccupied by the 'reconfiguration of desire' as a dominant theme: 'By 1939, British culture had been thoroughly permeated by psychoanalytic ideas, turning concepts such as repression, sublimation, and the Oedipus complex into a common-if debased-currency.' 11 Psychological concerns acquired widespread acceptance during the war years, and could be found in a range of writing, from advice columns in women's magazines, through private diaries and questionnaire responses collected by the Mass-Observation project.…”

Introduction

“…The end‐point of a long 1930s is as debatable and complex as a moment of origin. But in setting out a new periodisation of the 1930s, and in tracing the politics within cultural preoccupations, we are influenced by Gill Plain's recent work on the 1940s, and her emphatic findings of as many threads of connectivity as moments of rift; between the 1940s and the literature of previous years, as well as between a literature of the Second World War and that of the years immediately after 1945 – a micro‐epoch which has remained neglected . Such work on the years immediately after 1945 could then lead plausibly to establish the late 1940s as an end‐point for the long 1930s.…”