Gill Plain's Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar, and “Peace” is a timely and welcome addition to the recent revival of scholarly interest in literature of the interwar and World War II periods. In the last ten years, there has been a substantial growth of scholarly interest in the cultural and literary output of the 1930s and 1940s, but often such studies have been confined to specialized academic conferences or special journal issues. Moreover, the classroom has been late to catch up, with literary courses on “Modern Britain,” frequently focusing on the early twentieth-century decades of Edwardian demise, experimental modernism, and World War I literature. Gill Plain's new study addresses this neglect by casting a fresh, critical eye on the war decade. She demonstrates with exhaustive coverage of British canonical and noncanonical prose, poetry, drama, and film how the literature of the forties defies modernist and postmodernist classifications, thus making her survey of the decade a new way to understand the emerging complexities of modernity in Britain.

One of the many virtues of Plain's book is the clear organization of ideas and material. She neatly divides her study into three sections to account for the historical shifts from war to postwar to the emerging Cold War, prefaced by a critical introduction to the varieties of literatures we will encounter throughout the book. The introduction provides a smart synthesis of familiar canonical names (Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Graham Greene, and Carol Reed) with artists often not appearing on academic syllabi (Elizabeth Bowen, Mervyn Peake, Nancy Mitford, and Henry Green, to name a few) in order for Plain to explain the “absent decade” (5) as a critical oversight caused by the blinding lights of modernist aesthetics. She argues compellingly for seeing World War II as a game changer that inaugurated a host of new critical voices that help us to rethink conceptions of British identity and gender beyond the traditionally male-dominated stories centered on Fitzrovia. Plain begins this exploration of the “absent decade” by emphasizing how the literature of the war years struggled to articulate the impact of the war at home. The radically different periods of the Sitzkrieg and the Blitz found British writers caught between a gulf of anxious boredom and immediate existential terror. Here Plain explores the work of Alun Lewis, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Elizabeth Berridge, Nevil Shute, Phyllis Bottome, and Barbara Noble to illustrate the varieties of disorientation that invaded British life due to the war: bureaucratic boredom, public duty to military factory life, and the displacement of children from class and home as the Blitz forced an exodus of Britain's youth to the countryside. Plain sees these dislocations instigating new debates about class, community, and individual agency as these fictions explore characters finding dissatisfaction and dread in the dehumanizing environments of the factory and bomb shelter, not to mention the psychological damage incurred by those losing the comforts and security of home.

Plain also shows how the war's disruption of everyday life raised blunt questions about gender roles, sexuality, and desire. As is well known, the war years brought women into the factories and straight into a newly prominent role in the British public life, yet Plain's careful analysis reveals a variety of limitations imposed on this newfound freedom. In works like Monica Dickens's The Fancy, Plain argues that female agency was tempered by the emergence of what second wave feminists have since termed the “second shift”: women may have found fulfillment by working outside the home, but they were also still expected to fulfill traditional roles of mothering and housekeeping. Her study of gender relations in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Hamilton, Henry Green, Graham Greene, and Mary Renault, among others, exposes the social-sexual tensions and repressed desires that reverberated under the veneer of British propriety. The crime novel and film noir become the central vehicle for making sense of these changes. For example, British male writers appropriated the popularized figure of the femme fatale to portray the socially mobile female body as a threat to masculinity and national security. If British writers were not questioning the limits of female agency in factory life, then they were engaged in analyzing or even promoting a misogyny that ultimately read women as either threats to traditional order or in the familiar safety of the homosocial bond.

Plain claims that the decade demanded a “new logic” (135) to make sense of the disorder war had brought. This new logic took the form of a mixture of genres and styles, from documentary realism, to experiments with crime-noir fictions, to conflicted meditations on memory and nostalgia. This last point is critical to British writers in Plain's study. The unalterable changes to national and personal character after the war and the foreboding uncertainty of “peace” in the beginning years of the Cold War find expression in ambivalent explorations of memory. Memory becomes a contested site: it affords the self a prelapsarian world of innocence while also exposing a delusional escapism. The kind of ambivalence Plain detects in these writers' negotiation of the past and present exposes Britain as a liminal space—individuals severed from who they once were, a nation no longer what it was, and past remembrances only serve to underscore the painful absence of the now. Perhaps most impressive of this analysis is Plain's reading of Orwell's 1984. Plain breathes new life into the novel by interpreting it as the example of liminal Britain par excellance: it mixes science fiction with espionage, with personal and national nostalgia, with political philosophy; it shows a defamiliarized Britain while bearing traces of postwar austerity; it presents a powerful female agency while relegating women to stereotypes of the physical; and it valorizes the British homosocial bond only to reveal that bond as lethal.

The main attraction of Gill Plain's book lies in its entertainingly accessible coverage of literary texts and social, intellectual issues. It is grounded in scholarly research, yet it is impressively free of scholarly jargon. The exhaustive coverage of works—of both established, canonical writers and “the popular and the middlebrow” (5)—provides added nuance for understanding conceptions of modernism, feminism, and the advent of postmodern and postcolonial currents in British society. Plain's overview of the decade will serve as an excellent guide for anyone wishing to learn about the literature of the period, and for teachers or scholars looking to rethink or revamp their approach to seemingly familiar territory.