Until very recently, literature in English of the late 1940s suffered from a strange critical underestimation. In contrast to the patent world-historical and geopolitical import of the years just after World War II, the period's literature seemed somehow lacking, or insufficiently engaged with its time. You could point to expressly political exceptions all day long. George Orwell's 1984 (1949), a dystopian narrative of near-future totalitarian governance, is the obvious exception among novels; Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos (1948), the late opus of a canonical modernist who denounced liberal democracy while serving as a champion for the Italian fascist government and then as a prisoner of the US government, is the most notorious poetic counterexample; and John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946), a nonfiction novel (Nadel 53) bearing witness to the destruction wrought by the United States' first use of an atomic bomb, must be the most debated exception among works of reportage. But in addition to reiterating a narrow mini-canon and accepting dated notions of what counts as political writing, you'd end up proving the long unexamined rule that the literature of the late 1940s failed in some way to meet its moment. Or, as Malcolm Bradbury once summarized the critical consensus on the 1940s as a whole, in Britain and elsewhere, [the decade] seems to mark a vacancy in recent cultural history, a period of relative artistic silence in the face of overwhelming historical upheaval (69). To which I say, in my most scholarly tone, Nonsense.

Seiler, Claire. On or About 1945. In The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English, edited by Matthew Stratton, 225-235. New York, NY: Routledge, 2023.

Claire Seiler is a professor of English at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Routledge's Website. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Politics-and-Literature-in-English/Stratton/p/book/9780367481032#

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