Writing (in) the Spaces of the Blitz: Spatial Myths and Memory in Wartime British Literature.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the literary response to the Second World War and the Blitz in Britain. I argue that the physical spaces and landscapes of wartime Britain offered writers a metaphorical vocabulary for addressing war’s devastating consequences and imagining a possible future. From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, experimental, popular, and amateur writers alike responded to the extreme circumstances of aerial attack in innovative ways that reveal an unexpected convergence in the preoccupations of modernist highbrow and routine middlebrow writing in a time of war. A comprehensive study of Blitz writing substantially alters narratives of midcentury modernism, war writing, and British literary history.

Blitz writers, generating a new type of battlefield text by and about non-soldiers, remade the physical spaces of England and transformed their symbolic value. In their work, air raid shelters, bombsites, and ruins become new catalysts for social and ideological encounters, which are also played out in more traditional literary spaces. Houses and domestic space are thrust from the private into the public sphere and lose their reassuring associations under threat of destruction. Bombed London and its urban spaces seem threatening and unreal, demanding imaginative rebuilding. The countryside invites a return to pastoral imagery as a way to address the war’s challenge to English history and identity.

Texts that demonstrate the complex memory work associated with these spaces include Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, Rumer Godden’s A Fugue in Time, Henry Green’s Caught, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, James Hanley’s No Directions, Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness, Mollie Panter-Downes’s One Fine Day, and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, along with lesser-known poetry, fiction, diaries, journalism, and propaganda. This project uses such texts to reconstruct a literary geography of the home-front experience in World War II Britain and create a memorial landscape that recalls how the air raids and bombings were understood and remembered during and immediately after the war.