British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration
Beryl Pong
Abstract
What happens to the concept of wartime in the 1940s? For the Duration excavates British late modernism’s relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. Coloured by the trauma of past violence and dread of those to come, the Second World War and its defining military strategy, civilian aerial bombardment, upended straightforward understandings of past, present, and future. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes—time capsules, time zones, and ruins—the book contends that Second World Wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime ... More
What happens to the concept of wartime in the 1940s? For the Duration excavates British late modernism’s relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. Coloured by the trauma of past violence and dread of those to come, the Second World War and its defining military strategy, civilian aerial bombardment, upended straightforward understandings of past, present, and future. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes—time capsules, time zones, and ruins—the book contends that Second World Wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime surpassed the boundaries of a specific state of emergency, becoming first routine and then open-ended. It scrutinizes a variety of cultural artefacts, from life-writings to short stories, from novels to film and painting, that formally registered the distinctiveness of this wartime through a complex feedback between anticipation and retrospection. While offering a strong foundation for new readers of the mid-century, the book and its overall theoretical focus on chronophobia will be an important intervention for those already working in the field.
Keywords:
Second World War,
wartime,
Blitz,
chronophobia,
late modernism,
temporality,
ruins,
time capsules,
time zones,
mid-century
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198840923 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198840923.001.0001 |
