This collection of essays by leading and emergent critics of twentieth-century fiction offers a wide-ranging and provocative reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism. Focusing on mid-century writing, the book identifies continuities of preoccupation - with national identity, historiography and the challenge to literary form presented by public and private violence--that span the entire century. The book offers new readings of such famous figures as Amis, Golding, Greene and Spark, and reappraises the work of brilliant but less familiar contemporaries including Ann Quin, Elizabeth Taylor and Storm Jameson.

Whereas trauma and memory have come to dominate discussions of World War Two, Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that it was in fact the representation of anxiety - a state in which we look forwards as well as backwards - that emerged most forcefully in mid-century wartime culture. For two crucial but understudied second generations, the psychoanalysts who came after Freud and whose work thrived in 1940s Britain, and the later modernists who had cut their teeth on the expressive verve of their First World War-shocked elders, thinking about anxiety, she argues, was a way of imagining how it might be possible to stay within a history that frequently undermined a sense of self and agency.

This study suggests that it was the representation of anxiety, rather than trauma and memory, that emerged most forcefully in mid-century wartime culture. Thinking about anxiety, Lyndsey Stonebridge argues, was a way of imagining how it might be possible to stay within a history that frequently undermined a sense of self and agency.

This collection of essays offers a wide-ranging and provocative reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism. The book identifies continuities of preoccupation - with national identity, historiography and the challenge to literary form presented by public and private violence - that span the entire century.