Back in the mid-1990s, Patricia Waugh maintained that Britain was living through the “harvest of the sixties.” (Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and Its Background, 1960–90 [1995], 1). In today's post-recession world of austerity, anti-immigration, imperial nostalgia, welfare reform, and the rise of Celtic nationalisms, it would seem that the harvest of that permissive decade is over, and that, socially and politically, our contemporary moment more closely resembles the immediate postwar years. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the last decade has seen a growth in critical attention on this previously overlooked period. Gill Plain's collection British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960 is a welcome and necessary addition to this field. Covering prose, poetry, drama, magazines, and radio broadcasts, as well as a range of genres encompassing crime fiction, travel writing, and children's literature, the essays capture a vibrant and often contradictory moment of possibility, where culture and society is caught between what Rebecca D'Monté identifies as “twin modes of thought”: the first being that “the war had provided an opportunity to rethink society,” while the second “looked back with a nostalgia to the past and saw the war as a disruption to normalcy” (78).

Positioned as it is between the innovations of modernism and the self-reflexive playfulness of the postmodern, the period between 1940 and 1960 is all too often regarded as an insular interregnum. As the essays in this collection by Alice Ferrebe, Tracy Hargreaves, and Victoria Stewart make clear, however, the period has been burdened by the prevailing logic of two expedient but monolithic binaries: internationalism versus parochialism and experimentation versus conservatism. In such readings, the literary world is seen to reflect British society's state of postwar exhaustion while also responding to the emerging realities of the end of empire by turning inward, replacing the old imperial vistas for the domestic dimensions of the kitchen sink. And yet, this varied and expansive collection shows that the mid-century decades are Janus-faced, being both constrained by and moving away from the forms of the past. Rather than a postwar interregnum, then, the collection makes a strong claim for the examination of a multitude of “transitions.”

A conceptual framework that binds these diverse explorations of cultural transition together is provided by Raymond Williams's formulation of dominant, residual, and emergent aspects of culture. As James Procter's contribution attests, given the quickening pace of geopolitical and literary histories, it is necessary to challenge epochal readings of 1940–1960 in favor of a more “staggered” history (117). These two decades, after all, are bookended by increased aerial attacks on British cities and Harold Wilson's declaration that the “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, taking in the Allied victory that ended the Second World War, the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush, and the Suez crisis. In the world of literature, the charge of a postwar parochialism cannot do justice to the complexities that arise from the waning of social mores and the emergence of new perspectives on class, race, nationhood, and sexuality. As the essays in this collection remind us, it is, after all, a period that saw the publication of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Philip Larkin's The Less Deceived, the first performances of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, the “arrival” both of postcolonial migrant voices and a reimagined imperial heroism, along with prescient glimpses of technological surveillance in George Orwell's 1984 and Muriel Spark's Momento Mori. Kate McLoughlin persuasively maintains that if the mid-century is a period of exhaustion it is not in the sense of decline but as a precursor to artistic conventions being subverted or transcended, a process that will become more forcefully realized throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This claim chimes with Mark Rawlinson's assertion that it is unsurprising given the upheavals of the mid-century decades “that writers worked in the interstices of ruined and reconstructed systems of meaning, rather than constructing myths of their own” (160).

It is in the imagery of ruination that the collection finds one its most promising interventions. For Hargreaves, “[t]he destructive blank space left by bomb damage” could be figured by postwar writers “as an exploratory blank page” (296), while Allan Hepburn asserts that “[c]atastrophe creates opportunities for imagining alternate forms of statehood, whether feudal, military, socialist or global” (370). At the same time, Plain shows how a damaged masculinity in the aftermath of two world wars gave rise to a “process of remasculinisation” in the figure of James Bond, “albeit one riven with self-doubt and anxiety” (101). Turning to the ruins of empire, Katie Gramich affirms that much of the writing coming out of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland “was by no means simply a belated reflection of the decline of empire, but rather a celebration of new, distinctive identities and energies” (85). Ruination, then, contains within it the possibility to emerge from the rubble of history and rebuild. This drive prefigures the enduring image of Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days (1961) buried to the waist in rubble and ordering herself to “begin.” But of course, she never moves and the rubble only keeps rising.