British Writing of the Second World War is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices which connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relations both to propaganda and to Peoples War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and memoirs in the context of official and unofficial discourses about military aviation, the Blitz, campaigns in North Africa, war aims, the conscript Army and the Home Front, Prisoners of War, and the Holocaust. It uncovers the processes by which the meanings the war had for participants were produced, and provides an extensive bibliographical resource for future scholarship.

Mark Rawlinson is Lecturer in English, University of Leicester

• Introduction


• 1: Reconnaissance: Violence, Representation, and Britain's Second World War


• 2: The Figure of the Airman


• 3: What targets for bombs: Spectacle, Reconstruction, and the London Blitz


• 4: Side Show or Second Front?: The Legibility of Battle in North Africa


• 5: War Aims and Outcomes


• 6: Were All Prisoners of War


• Conclusion


• Bibliography


• Index