Warfare, Welfare Windrush: Literature in Britain at Mid-Century

3 Credits.

It has lately been recognized that the middle of the twentieth century was a period of exceptional literary invention. The 1930s through the 1960s gave us challenging, fascinating, sometimes infuriating texts that offer crucial windows onto the birth of the postwar world order and thus into the life of our own time. This course will examine British mid-century writing addressing the aftermath of World War II, the rise of the welfare state, and the “colonization in reverse” that brought the Windrush writers from the Caribbean to England. Authors studied may include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, T.S. Eliot, Richard Hoggart, George Lamming, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, John Osborne, and John Wyndham.