Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar FictionsThis book represents a major remapping of the literary history of the 1950s. Our cultural memory of the period has been dominated by the Angry Young Man, the teenage revolution, 'consensus' politics, and the emergence of 1960s permissiveness. Yet this picture seriously misrepresents the new position of women in postwar society. Women in the 1950s are usually understood to have played a traditionally nurturing and reproductive role, to have obediently returned to the home after the upheavals of the war. In fact the numbers of working women and the range of work they undertook expanded throughout these years. The vital contribution that working women could make to a modern economy and an egalitarian society was recognized in both official discourses, such as government reports, and in popular literary genres written by and for women: romances, country house novels, magazine stories, and fiction for adolescents. The contention of this book is that a reading of these forms shows a clear resistance inpopular consciousness to any simple, domesticated or consumerist notion of femininity in the period. Such lost narratives have never previously figured in the literary history of the 1950s, but they offer a new and exciting insight into the postwar realignment of gender roles and the modernization of concepts of femininity. In the light of this new perspective the book also offers a rereading of a range of more familiar, canonical texts of the period. The book will be of value for all women who may have 'misremembered' the period, for students and scholars of postwar British literature, and for related disciplines such as women's studies, cultural studies, and social history. |
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Contents
Women writers working heroines | 14 |
literature and eugenics in postwar Britain | 24 |
the crisis of the country house in the postwar | 41 |
Copyright | |
7 other sections not shown
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Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions Deborah Philips,Ian Haywood No preview available - 1998 |
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Alan Tomlinson Angry Young Anne Lorraine aristocratic aspirations bachelor girl bad girl become Borstal Brideshead Revisited British career girl career novel career woman child contemporary country house romance crime cultural daughter discourses Doctor Lucy doctor-heroine domestic dual role Education Elizabeth Wilson English eugenicist experience Faber false hero female femininity feminist Franchise Affair Fyvel gender genre glamorous Half-Crown House Harmondsworth Haslett heritage hero heroine heroine's hospital Ibid ideal ideology inheritance Jane Jane and Prudence labour London male marriage married masculine maternal matron medical romances medicine meritocracy Methuen middle-class Mills & Boon modern mother motherhood National Health Service numbers nursing heroine offer patients Penguin plot popular fiction Postwar Britain postwar period potential practice problem profession professional represents romance fiction romance narrative romance novels Routledge seen sexual shown skills society story theme tion traditional Twisted Road upper-class Viola Klein Welfare White-coated Girl wife woman doctor working-class youth